Court upholds retaliation finding against Charter over arbitration letters

The sequence is what HR teams should sit with. After he was fired, the worker filed an age discrimination complaint with the agency. Charter wrote back in September 2019, saying a binding arbitration agreement meant he could not take the claim to court. The letter told him to “be aware” that the agreement entitled the company to costs and fees, including attorneys’ fees, if it had to go to court to force arbitration. 

It did not stop there. With the complaint still open, Charter sent two more letters, in June 2020 and March 2021, asking him to withdraw it because of the arbitration agreement. 

The agency read those letters as retaliation, and the court found substantial evidence supporting that read. The letters told the worker he could not pursue his claims and floated the idea of him covering Charter’s costs and attorneys’ fees. As the court put it, “such threats could have dissuaded a reasonable person from” pursuing a discrimination complaint. 

That line is the lesson. Retaliation does not have to look like a firing or a pay cut. A letter that pressures someone to drop a protected complaint, with a money threat attached, can clear the bar by itself. 

Charter pushed back on two fronts. It argued the agency should not have amended the complaint to include the 2020 and 2021 letters, and that the penalties were too steep. The court turned both down. The later letters, it said, were “essentially the same conduct” as the first, and the $50,000 fine was not “so disproportionate to the offense as to be shocking to one’s sense of fairness.”