Employees with mental disabilities were allegedly paid $65 a month to eviscerate turkeys full-time. They were also housed in deplorable conditions and denied access to medical care, the EEOC reports.

Perhaps equally shocking — and equally against the Americans with Disabilities Act — is the abuse that the EEOC claims was heaped on the workers on top of the alleged flagrant violations of wage, housing and benefit standards. The EEOC press release elaborates:

Verbal abuses included frequently referring to the workers as “retarded”, “dumb ass” and “stupid”.  Class members reported acts of physical abuse including hitting, kicking, at least one case of handcuffing, and forcing the disabled workers to carry heavy weights as punishment.  The Henry’s Turkey supervisors, also the workers’ purported caretakers, were often dismissive of complaints of injuries or pain.

Such employee abuse as alleged to have happened at Henry’s Turkey Service could gain a degree of protection with the passage of bills like Iowa’s HF 589, introduced by state representative and rancher Annette Sweeney (R-Alden) last month. The bill passed in the House on March 17 and is currently undergoing review in the Senate. As reported by The Iowa Independent’s Lynda Waddington, HF 589 defines taking photographs or video of a farm without the express approval of its owner as “animal facility interference,” punishable by up to five years in prison and $7,500 in fines.

Reuters reports, “The Iowa measure was introduced after a number of group released videos showing cows being shocked, pigs beaten and chicks ground up alive.” Sweeney has defended his bill as “empowering” to whistleblowers, saying that it encourages the reporting of offenses through official channels rather than grassroots action.

The Florida Independent’s Brett Ader has previously reported on similar legislation in Florida.

Congress has held two hearings already on the cases of Ashcroft v. Iqbal and Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, which introduced a new “credibility” requirement in pleading standards that civil rights advocates and some Democratic lawmakers complain leaves the fate of discrimination victims to the prejudices of a particular judge assigned to the case. Now, instead of simply having to state clearly what the claims are, plaintiffs have to convince the judge that those claims are credible at the outset, before even having had an opportunity to collect evidence to support them.

While that pleases some conservatives who view most civil rights lawsuits with skepticism, civil rights experts say it rewards employers and others who discriminate but have learned to cover their tracks.

As the Times puts it today: “The practical impact in, say, an employment discrimination case is to disadvantage the wronged employee, who is unlikely to have access at the outset to the records needed to prove wrongful conduct.”

The Times cites John Payton, president of the NAACP legal defense fund, who recently testified that some of the landmark cases of the civil rights era might never have survived the Supreme Court’s new standard. In his written testimony submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month, Payton cites specific examples of potentially meritorious cases that didn’t survive the new standard because the plaintiffs couldn’t convince a skeptical judge that employment, voting or housing discrimination is “credible.”

As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a former U.S. Attorney, put it at that Senate hearing, “In my experience, misconduct is inherently implausible” because we generally expect people to act decently, fairly and lawfully.

Nadler’s legislation acknowledges the fact that sometimes, they don’t live up to that standard.

“NOT EVEN ONE JUSTICE APPROVED SOTOMAYER IN RICCI CASE,” blares the headline of a statement from Wendy Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, on the Supreme Court’s decision.

“Frank Ricci finally got his day in court, despite the judging of Sonia Sotomayor, which all nine Justices of U.S. Supreme Court have now confirmed was in error,” she writes.

Huh?  Today’s ruling, as I noted before, was 5-4. Five justices voted to require the city to present more evidence — what the Supreme Court calls “a strong basis in evidence” — that if the city had not thrown out the results of a promotional exam that had a disparate impact on minorities, then it would have been legally liable to any racial minorities denied promotions who sued under the civil rights law.

Setting aside, for a moment, whether that evidentiary burden makes sense, there’s no question that only five of the nine justices supported it. The other four were just fine with the law the way it was, and believed that the city had presented sufficient evidence to satisfy its decision.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the four justices in dissent, questioned the court’s “newly announced strong-basis-in-evidence” standard and recites in painstaking detail the evidence supporting the city’s decision. She went on to note that since the majority is announcing “a new legal rule,” then it should remand the case to allow the lower courts to apply it, since they didn’t have notice before that that’s what the rule was. “[T]he ordinary course is to remand and allow the lower courts to apply the rule in the first instance,” she wrote, chastising the majority for not following that usual course and instead deciding against the city of New Haven.

Within hours after the decision, conservatives had turned this notion that the majority should have remanded the case if it was going to decide a new legal rule into the idea that the four dissenting justices had repudiated Sotomayor and the reasoning of the Second Circuit panel on which she sat.

“This was a unanimous decision that the 2nd circuit was incorrect,” said Gail Heriot, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law on a conference call organized by the Federalist Society this morning. “Nobody agreed with Sotomayor. Nobody.”

As Long continues in her release:

“Usually, poor performance in any profession is not rewarded with the highest job offer in the entire profession.

“What Judge Sotomayor did in Ricci was the equivalent of a pilot error resulting in a bad plane crash. And now the pilot is being offered to fly Air Force One.

Well, that’s not how Justice Ginsburg and her co-dissenters see it, as they made clear in this passage:

Applying what I view as the proper standard to the record thus far made, I would hold that New Haven had ample cause to believe its selection process was flawed and not justified by business necessity. Judged by that standard, petitioners have not shown that New Haven’s failure to certify the exam results violated Title VII’s disparate-treatment provision.

UPDATE: Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) has weighed in with his view of today’s Supreme Court decision in the Ricci case, and — suprise! — he reads the 5-4 decision as a 9-0 against Sotomayor, just like Wendy Long and the Federalist Society lawyers do:

Today’s decision is a victory for evenhanded application of the law. Saying the earlier decision was “antithetical to the notion of a workplace where individuals are guaranteed equal opportunity regardless of race,” the Supreme Court saw the case for what it is: a “race-based decision” that violates federal law. And while the Justices divided on the outcome, all nine Justices were critical of the trial court opinion that Judge Sotomayor endorsed. [Emphasis added.]

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In concluding that a plaintiff claiming age discrimination must show not only that age was a motivating factor in the employer’s decision, but the determinative motivating factor, the court is essentially requiring the employee to produce direct evidence that the employer’s action was based only on age. In the past, because employers are careful to hide direct evidence of discriminatory motives, after a plaintiff had provided evidence of age discrimination the burden shifted to the employer to prove its legitimate reason for firing or demoting the older employee.

In this ruling, the high court appears to have just upended the prevailing understanding of employment discrimination law dating back to the case of Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, a key Supreme Court ruling in 1989, and effectively pronounced that age discrimination is simply less important to remedy than race, gender, ethnic or disability discrimination.

Given how widespread layoffs of older employees are in this economy, the court just substantially undercut the only federal protection those employees have.

Justice John Paul Stevens, in his dissent, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and David Souter (yes, another 5-4 decision), called the majority’s opinion “particularly inappropriate” given the “unambiguous history” of courts interpreting the application of the age discrimination law in the same way as other employment discrimination prohibitions.

“I disagree not only with the court’s interpretation of the statute, but also with its decision to engage in unnecessary lawmaking,” he wrote.

This afternoon, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) also weighed in on the decision with a statement.

“In the Supreme Court’s decision today, five justices acted to disregard precedent and ignore the plain reading and common understanding of the statute that Congress passed to protect Americans from discrimination based on their age,” he said, adding: “By disregarding congressional intent and the time-honored understanding of the statute, a five member majority of the Court has today stripped our most senior American employees of important protections.”

Business groups have spent millions lobbying against the Ledbetter bill, which allows women who were discriminated against to sue their employer as long as the discrimination continues:  in other words, if a female employee was being paid less than a man doing the same job for the last five years, she can sue for pay discrimination as long as she’s still being paid less.  She can only receive damages going back two years, though.  Employers’ groups have argued that’s still unfair, complaining that it’s too difficult to defend an employment decision from five years ago.

But even more significant are a few other pieces of legislation that may be coming down the pike:

The first is the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would lift the cap on punitive and compensatory damages that currently exist in Equal Pay Act cases. That means a jury would decide how much the employer owes the employee who was being discriminated against, instead of the law arbitrarily imposing a limit. It would also allow employees to more easily include others in their class action claims, when a group of people — say, all women working at a checkout counter — are discriminated against similarly.

Then, there’s the Civil Rights Act of 2008 — which could be introduced as the Civil Rights Act of 2009 — that would more broadly lift those damages caps on all employment discrimination claims. Right now, there’s a $300,000 limit imposed by law.

Employment defense lawyers tell me that their clients are already working hard behind the scenes to keep that legislation from coming to the floor for a vote. Though they succeeded in rallying staunch Republican opposition to the Ledbetter Act, a Democratic Congress passed it anyway.

Employee advocates will have to push back hard if they’re going to win these battles.