Title VII protects employees from retaliation by their employers for opposing or reporting discriminatory employment practices. 

In order to establish a prima facie case of retaliation under Title VII, an employee is required to demonstrate that he or she engaged in a “protected activity”; that the employer took an adverse employment action against him or her after or contemporaneous with the protected activity; and a causal link exists between the employee’s protected activity and the employer’s adverse action. 

In Sung Tran v. Delavau LLC, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania discussed if there is any length of time which is too long between the employee’s protected activity and the employer’s adverse action to illustrate a causal link.  

The plaintiff in Sung Tran was selected for layoff in early 2005.  In the years prior to his layoff, he had filed several grievances and an employment discrimination charge with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission (PHRC) and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).  The plaintiff in Sung Tran believed his layoff was in retaliation for engaging in protected activity. 

The federal district court in Sung Tran easily agreed that the employment discrimination charge and the grievances constituted protected activity and that his layoff was an “adverse” employment action. 

In addressing whether a causal link existed between the filing of those charge and grievances and the layoff, the federal district court pointed out that over 2 years separated the filing of the charge and less than a year had passed after the filing of the grievances before he was laid off.  While the federal district court cautioned that “temporal proximity at issue here is not ‘unusually suggestive’ of causation”, it noted that, pursuant to previous decisions of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, “mere passage of time is not legally conclusive proof against retaliation”.  Furthermore, where “the time between the protected activity and adverse action is not so close as to be unusually suggestive of a causal connection standing alone, courts may look to the intervening period for demonstrative proof, such as actual antagonistic conduct or animus against the employee”.     

The federal district court’s ruling in Sung Tran has thus allowed the plaintiff to proceed forward with the lawsuit based upon alleged employer misconduct which has transpired over the course of several years.

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