On November 1, 2022, the First Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion addressing employers’ liability in a wrongful termination case involving discrimination and retaliation claims under Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 151B. The First Circuit’s opinion provided an in-depth discussion on pretext and causation under the McDonnell-Douglas framework, ultimately holding that “close temporal proximity” between an employee’s engagement in protected activity under the statute and his or her termination alone does not establish pretext where an employer has a legitimate business reason for the termination.
The First Circuit concluded that “[w]hile circumstantial evidence of temporal proximity between a protected activity and an adverse employment action can, in some cases, give rise to an inference that an employer’s stated basis for the decision was pretext masking for retaliatory animus, that evidence must be considered alongside the rest of the . . . record.” The court reached this conclusion based on the employer’s uncontradicted evidence of the plaintiff’s misconduct on a separate, unrelated matter and in closer proximity to his termination. Ultimately, the court held that the correlation between the time of termination and the employee’s engagement in protected activity alone would not allow a reasonable juror to infer that the employer’s stated reasons for terminating the plaintiff were pretextual, or a pretense, for its retaliatory animosity toward him, where the employer could show that it had other unrelated and separate reasons for the termination.
This decision impacts employers because it clarifies that merely engaging in protected activity that was in close proximity to an employee’s termination will not shield the employee from the consequences of misconduct violating company policy if the employer can adequately establish its reasons for termination. Employers should consistently enforce their policies and maintain detailed records documenting employees’ disciplinary incidents and history to show their legitimate business reasons for taking any adverse action against an employee, such as termination.
