Westbrook, Maine Employment Lawyers

Originally known as Stroudwater, the City was incorporated as Westbrook in 1814 in honor of Colonel Thomas Westbrook, an early settler. The Presumpscot River runs through it, which made it a prime location for the paper mill industry in the early days. Sappi Paper Mill, formerly known as S.D. Warren, was once the city’s largest employer and taxpayer before foreign competition forced large scale shutdowns. Nowadays, the leading industry in Westbrook is biotechnology with IDEXX Laboratories headquartered there. A popular agricultural attraction in Westbrook is Smiling Hill Farm, a working dairy that produces milk in glass bottles, ice cream, butter and cheese and offers cross-country skiing in the winter. Haven’s Candies, a popular Maine confectioner established in 1915, is also located in Westbrook.

Maine Employee Rights Group represents Westbrook employees in all types of employment discrimination cases. Recent examples of cases we have handled for Westbrook employees include:

Our firm represented an employee at pool supply store who was terminated exactly one week after cooperating with an OSHA investigation of a recent chemical spill at the store warehouse. Management ordered the other warehouse workers to double stack pallets that held containers of pool chemicals which led to a major spill. Management ordered the employees to clean up the spill but did not provide respirators or other necessary safety equipment. Someone called OSHA and an investigator made a surprise visit to the store. OSHA interviewed our client. Our client cooperated with the investigation and answered truthfully about prior chemical spills in the warehouse. One week later, our client was fired. Our client had worked at the store for three years and had recently been promoted, which precluded the employer from claiming his termination was performance-related. We were able to elicit contradictory statements from our client’s supervisor about why our client was fired. That and the close time proximity between our client’s protected activity and his termination enabled us to obtain a monetary settlement for our client without a trial.

We represented a substance abuse counselor at a recovery center who was terminated after repeatedly asking the center manager to address an ongoing problem of sexual harassment by a supervisor at the center. When the manager failed to act, our client raised the issue at a staff meeting. Subsequently, one of the doctors at the center spoke up about the toxic environment this supervisor was creating and demanded immediate action. The harasser was then terminated, but so was our client, for being “disruptive” and “not a team player.” The center then refused to provide the State with certain information required to maintain our client’s professional license which impeded her ability to find other counseling work. Also, when potential employers asked our client why she left her previous job, she was forced to say she was terminated for being “disruptive,” which we argued was defamation of her professional character. In discovery, we were able to link the center to its parent company, increasing its financial exposure to our client. Following depositions, the case resulted in a monetary settlement to our client, with the center providing the State with the needed information and a strong letter of recommendation to give to potential employers.

If you have been terminated for reporting unsafe or unlawful conditions at work, or cooperating with a government investigation, call Maine Employee Rights Group, 207.874.0905, for legal consultation.