April 07, 2026
HR Serves as Manager’s Firewall – Cat’s Paw Claim Fails
Attention Leadership and Supervisory Team Members. This story is another example of how you can help HR help you and keep you safe. It is hard to discriminate against what you do not know.
An employee tells two managers and HR that his supervisor is giving female employees preferential treatment. Shortly thereafter, the supervisor fires the employee for unsatisfactory work performance. The employee then sues for unlawful retaliation. What the former employee did not know is that at the time the supervisor decided to fire the employee, HR and the managers had not yet told the supervisor about the report.
The court explains, “To prove causation on a retaliation claim, a plaintiff must show either that the decisionmaker on the adverse employment action knew of his protected activity, or that a person harboring retaliatory animus knew and used the decisionmaker as a cat’s paw.” Not familiar with the reference to the “Monkey and the Cat” fable? Click here.
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the plaintiff failed to provide sufficient evidence to show either. The supervisor could not have directly retaliated against the employee since he did not know about the complaint. Nor could he have used the managers or HR as his pawn to agree to fire the employee based on a retaliatory animus because, again, he did not know about the complaint.
Take Away? HR is your firewall. HR is there to protect you (and, yes, employees, too). If HR does not give you as much information about an employee as you would like, assume positive intent. It is likely they are not trying to act surreptitiously or to hide information from you. They are trying to keep you safe. Whether it is not disclosing medical information about an employee or the specific nature of an employee’s concern or complaint, in some instances the less you know the better.
