Filing a Workplace Harassment Complaint in Louisiana

It can, up to six months. La. R.S. 23:303(D) suspends the one-year prescriptive period during the pendency of any administrative review or investigation of the claim conducted by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or the Louisiana Commission on Human Rights, and then provides that no such suspension shall last longer than six months. That makes an administrative charge genuinely useful to a Louisiana state claim rather than just a parallel track. It also means a long investigation will not keep the state claim alive past the cap, so keep counting rather than waiting for the agency to finish.

Louisiana is one of the states where the answer can be the reverse of what you expect. La. R.S. 23:302(2) applies the chapter only to an employer who employs twenty or more employees within this state for each working day in each of twenty or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding calendar year, while federal Title VII reaches employers with fifteen. A worker at a business with fifteen to nineteen Louisiana employees therefore has a federal claim and no state claim. Because the count is limited to employees within Louisiana, a national company's out-of-state headcount does not bring a small local site into the state law.

No, and the exclusion is unusually wide. La. R.S. 23:302(2)(b) removes from the chapter the employment of an individual by a private educational or religious institution or any nonprofit corporation, with no size qualifier and no limit to religious employers. So a worker at a Louisiana charity, hospital foundation or trade association organized as a nonprofit has no claim under this chapter at all. Federal law has no comparable exemption, so the EEOC route is the one to look at, subject to the fifteen-employee threshold.

Yes. La. R.S. 23:302(2)(a) excludes employment of an individual by a parent, spouse or child, and employment in the domestic service of the employer, so household workers are outside the chapter regardless of the employer's size. That sits alongside the twenty-employee threshold in La. R.S. 23:302(2) and the exclusion of private educational and religious institutions and nonprofit corporations in La. R.S. 23:302(2)(b). Anyone in one of those categories should ask a Louisiana employment lawyer what federal or local routes remain.

La. R.S. 23:332(A)(1) reaches conduct with respect to compensation, or terms, conditions, or privileges of employment because of an individual's race, color, religion, sex, national origin, military status, or natural, protective or cultural hairstyle. One word runs through the whole section and is worth noticing: every operative clause requires intentional conduct, and the section itself is titled intentional discrimination in employment. That is not the way federal Title VII is phrased, and how it applies to a hostile environment theory built on an employer's response to coworker conduct is a question for a Louisiana employment lawyer. The chapter also covers age, disability and pregnancy in separate Parts with their own scope provisions.

Yes, and unusually concretely. La. R.S. 23:332(A)(1) includes natural, protective, or cultural hairstyle among the grounds, and La. R.S. 23:332(I) provides that the term shall include but is not limited to afros, dreadlocks, twists, locs, braids, cornrow braids, Bantu knots, curls, and hair styled to protect hair texture or for cultural significance. Because it sits in the same clause covering terms, conditions or privileges of employment, harassment on that basis is within the section rather than limited to hiring and firing. The twenty-employee threshold in La. R.S. 23:302(2) still has to be met.