Guides to recognising, documenting, and escalating mistreatment at work in the United States.
Applies to employment in the United States. Covers a psychological term and its limits, not a legal test. DARVO stands for deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. It describes how some people react to being confronted. What does not exist is a workplace study: as of 3 September 2026 no published research measures DARVO … Read more
Applies to employment in the United States, private and public sector, with the territorial and state exceptions named individually. No federal law and no US state law makes workplace bullying unlawful on its own. You can only act on it when it attaches to something the law already protects: a protected characteristic, protected activity, a … Read more
Applies to the United States: the federal doctrine under Title VII and its sibling statutes. The Tennessee and California provisions named below are state law, and the Puerto Rico act is Puerto Rico law. Federal circuits vary in application, and state fair-employment statutes carry their own definitions. A hostile work environment, in US law, is … Read more
Applies to the United States. Whether any specific set of facts meets the standard is decided case by case, and federal circuits differ. This page sorts the categories; it cannot tell you your own outcome. Constructive discharge examples get sorted by how bad the conduct feels. That is the wrong axis, and it is why … Read more
Applies to the United States: federal statutes, Supreme Court authority, and named unemployment provisions from California, Minnesota, New York, Texas and Massachusetts. State fair-employment statutes and federal circuit precedent carry their own variations. Constructive discharge is a resignation that the law treats as a firing. It requires two things: conditions so intolerable that a reasonable … Read more
Applies to the United States, and to private-sector and state or local government employees. Federal employees and applicants use a different route with a much shorter first step, set out below. Filing an EEOC complaint means filing a charge: a written statement, signed and verified, that asks the agency to act. The online inquiry the … Read more
Applies to the United States. Covers federal law: Title VII, the ADA and the parallel routes at OSHA, the NLRB and the Department of Labor. State fair-employment statutes carry their own elements and their own filing clocks. Proving workplace retaliation takes three things: a protected activity, an employer action a reasonable worker would find materially … Read more
Applies to the United States. Written for private-sector at-will employment, with the federal civil service rules used as the contrast. A performance improvement plan is a document, not a legal status. No federal statute or regulation creates one, defines what it must contain, or requires one before a US private-sector firing. Signing it changes nothing … Read more
Applies to the United States: federal law plus the named state and territory provisions. Scope is one person: whether a manager’s conduct is toxic, not whether the workplace is. A bad boss and a toxic boss are not two points on one scale. They are separately named and separately measured patterns of behavior, with different … Read more
Applies to the United States, in private and public employment. Federal statutes, and named state statutes where the state rule differs. Favoritism at work is lawful across the United States unless it operates through something a statute names. Title VII reaches employment decisions made “because of” race, color, religion, sex or national origin (42 U.S.C. … Read more
