Employment – ERISA — retaliation

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United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

Civil

Employment – ERISA — retaliation

Where an employee complained to his employer that money was not being deposited into his retirement account and was subsequently terminated, summary judgment was improperly granted to the employer on his ERISA complaint alleging retaliation under Section 510.

“We conclude that the best reading of §510 is one that divides the world into the informal sphere of giving information in or in response to inquiries and the formal sphere of testifying in proceedings. This means that an employee’s grievance is within §510’s scope whether or not the employer solicited information. It does not mean that §510 covers trivial bellyaches— the statute requires the retaliation to be ‘because’ of a protected activity. See Kasten, 131 S. Ct. at 1334–35. Someone must ask a question, and the adverse action must be caused by the question or the response. What’s more, the grievance must be a plausible one, though not necessarily one on which the employee is correct. We have held that the anti-retaliation provision of Title VII does not protect employees who make insubstantial complaints. See, e.g., Mattson v. Caterpillar, Inc., 359 F.3d 885, 890–92 (7th Cir. 2004). That’s equally true for §510.”

Vacated and Remanded.

11-3291 George v. Junior Achievement of Central Indiana, Inc.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, Magnus-Stinson, J., Easterbrook, J.