Q. My wife and I live in a midsize apartment complex. My wife is the “fill-in” office manager — she takes over when the regular manager has to be away or is ill. But she’s just been fired, and I think it’s because the owner is mad at me.
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After weeks of trying to get the owner to deal with an infestation of mice, I called the local health department. They sent someone over who declared the situation a hazard and gave the owners a warning notice.
I was within my rights to complain! Can the owner get away with this?
A. You’ve asked a very timely question, and one that might not have a clear answer. To get as close as we can, we need to look at a recent U.S. Supreme Court case, Thompson v. North American Stainless LP, in which a man was fired after his fiancee, who worked for the same company, filed a sex discrimination claim.
The fired male worker sued, arguing that he’d been fired in retaliation for his fiancee’s action but ran into the problem that it wasn’t him who had filed the discrimination claim — it was his fiancee. The lower courts barred his suit, but the Supreme Court allowed him to go forward.
The unanimous decision held that “injuring him was the employer’s intended means of harming (her). Hurting him was the unlawful act by which the employer punished her. In these circumstances, we think (he was) well within the zone of interests sought to be protected by (the antidiscrimination law). He is a person aggrieved with standing to sue.”
At first blush, your situation is quite similar. You’ve exercised a tenant right — complaining to a government agency about unfit or unhealthy conditions — that most states want to encourage. To make that encouragement mean something, state laws protect tenants from landlord retaliation when they complain in good faith. That’s similar to protecting workers from retaliation when they file a good-faith complaint against their employers.
Had the female worker in Thompson been fired, there would have been no question about her right to sue for retaliation; and had your wife filed the report with the health department and been fired as a result, she too could have easily maintained a lawsuit against her employer.
Your situation is somewhat different because you are mixing tenant rights and employee rights. The Thompson case was all about employee rights: The woman was an employee whose fiance was fired after she filed a claim. You are a tenant whose wife (an employee) was fired after you exercised a protected tenant right.
The question is whether your exercise of your rights as a tenant brings your wife within the realm of protection that she would have had if you had exercised an employee’s right.
I can see a judge ruling in your wife’s favor if she were to bring a retaliation claim against her employer, the landlord. The policy behind retaliation, in both the employment and landlord/tenant worlds, is the same: to encourage honest complaints and reporting. Because courts want to protect the rights of both tenants and employees, the fact that you were a tenant and not an employee should not change the outcome.
Your landlord was trying to discourage you from exercising your legal rights by taking action against your wife. Like the man in Thompson, she is the one who was hurt by the landlord’s retaliation, so she arguably comes within the zone of interests the law seeks to protect.
In these circumstances, a court may well decide that she has a valid legal claim for retaliation.