is requiring &quot;auto pay&quot; for a better car insurence payment plan considered discrimination my car insurance company doubles up my first monthly payment if i dont use auto pay. is this considered discrimination. Why should I be penalized for not giving access to my bank account.....
It may be discrimination, but it is not discrimination based upon any reason that the company is prohibited from engaging in. This conduct is legal in pretty much all U.S. jurisdictions.
If the employee has the choice - bonus and membership, or no bonus - then I expect the offer to be legal. Since it is a real bonus and part of your salary you will have to pay income tax on it. What might be illegal, but not your concern, is if your company tells investors how well the company is doing, and how well the membership scheme is doing, when in reality 80% of members are employees paying effectively nothing.
Your personal liability depends on your state law regarding the family car doctrine, so the answer there is "maybe" (Texas is not a state with that doctrine, so simple ownership of the car does not confer liability). You would be liable if your supervision of the child was negligent, which means approximately that you knew or should have known that she was a bad driver and would cause damage. Still, the insurance company is suppose to indemnify you (plural) against such loses, as long as they are legally required to do so. That would include many considerations, such as whether the driver was covered under the policy, whether the car was being used contrary to the terms of the policy (being used commercially), and so on. The insurance company is entitled to make a reasonable determination of whether they are responsible for the loss (and if so, to what extent). If they actually decline to cover the loss, you would need to sue them to make them comply with the terms of the policy (and your lawyer would give you a detailed explanation of why they are not liable, in case they aren't). The plaintiff works with his insurance company to recover his insured losses, and with his lawyer to recover any uninsured losses. His insurance company works with your insurance company, up to a point, and then the lawyers get involved. Your daughter does not work with his insurance company, and your insurance company probably has said something along the line "only talk to us". The insurance that a driver typically has may cover some of their own medical costs, but does not provide a payment for "pain and suffering": that is an uninsured loss. It is not generally required that drivers carry insurance to cover their own medical expenses – it is required that they insure against damages, in general, suffered by other parties (if the defendant is at fault). So there is probably nothing for the plaintiff to work out with his insurance company. In Texas, if the defendant is entirely at fault, defendant will be liable for 100% of plaintiff's damages. If defendant is 90% at fault, defendant will be liable for 90% of plaintiff's damages. If defendant is 49% at fault, defendant is not liable. Defendant can, in any event, also sue for damages, so if defendant is 49% at fault, defendant can recover 49% of her damages. The insurance companies might be able to talk it out and reach a clear resolution of the matter, but it could be more in their interest to throw the dice and work it out in court. One can always sue at the very start, and drop the suit if it becomes advantageous.
In general, people have less expectation of privacy in cars than in their homes. To challenge a search and/or seizure under the Fourth Amendment, a person must have standing - the right to sue (that is, you must have had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the place where the search happened; if you didn't, no standing - can't claim your privacy was violated if you had no privacy). The US Circuit Courts are split on the issue of unauthorized rental drivers and whether they have the same reasonable expectation of privacy as the authorized driver of a rental car would have. Some Circuits allow the unauthorized driver to challenge a car search if the authorized driver gave them permission. Some Circuits look only at the agreement and if the driver isn't authorized on that, they're out of luck. The 6th Circuit is more case-by-case, with a presumption that driver can't challenge the search that can be overcome based on the facts. (All this info from US v. Haywood, 324 F.3d 514) There's a current case before the Supreme Court (argued January 9, 2018), Byrd v. US, on this very issue. This SCOTUSblog page has a lot of information on the case. Edited to add: Texas is in the Fifth Circuit, which follows the rule that unauthorized drivers don't have standing to challenge a search/seizure even with the authorized driver's permission to drive the car; unauthorized drivers of rental cars don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy because they lack a possessory interest in the car and/or they're violating the rental agreement. Basically, even though it seems the cops' stop of the car would've violated the Fourth Amendment if he were the authorized driver, since this happened in Texas, he's not going to be able to challenge the stop. IMO, this is incredibly unjust especially when the cops admitted there was no probable cause, so hopefully the Supreme Court makes this rule obsolete and allows unauthorized drivers to exercise their Fourth Amendment rights. Some law review articles on the topic of unauthorized rental drivers: "Hertz and the Fourth Amendment" "Resolving a Three-Way Circuit Split"
The most likely reason the other driver doesn't want to go through insurance is to avoid a raise in his premiums. However, there could be more serious consequences, up to and including having his insurance cancelled, for example, if the son was not supposed to be driving the car, or based on the criminal nature of the offense. However, there can be serious consequences to not dealing with insurance. Some (if not all) insurance policies require him to report the accident; by failing to do so, he may risk losing his insurance. More importantly to you, if he does not report a claim to his insurance, his insurance will not pay it. This is important to you, because insurance companies, as a general rule, pay claims. Random people don't always; they ignore you, they move out of state, they go bankrupt. If this is a serious amount of money, you need to talk to a lawyer before you enter into a contract with this person, to make sure that it's enforceable, and that if you don't get paid, you have some recourse.
At this point, there is little legal recourse. Once the delay becomes "unreasonable", you might be able to sue them and get some compensation. I do not know what would constitute an "unreasonable" delay in your circumstances and I don't doubt that a month seems unreasonable. You have explained the reasons for the delay, so it's not like they are waiting around for no reason. They are not required to hire more agents to process the claim; unfortunately, they are not legally required to act in a fashion that customers like (i.e. aggressively work to solve the problem). It does sound like there is a customer-service problem, which is what reviews and the BBB are about. You can of course be on the phone with the mechanic and the insurance agency, and if things get severe you can file a complaint with the state insurance commissioner.
Yes, this is legal, unless Richardson, TX has a specific local law making it illegal. In the US, discrimination is legal, unless it discriminates against one or more specific enumerated classes. Under federal law, and as far as I am aware, Texas law, students are NOT a protected class. As such discrimination against them is legal, unless Richardson, TX or its incorporating county have a specific law or regulation prohibiting it. Incidentally, age is generally not a protected class, and when it is a protected class, it is generally only illegal to discriminate against people above a specified age, not below. Note that discrimination happens all the time, over a variety of factors, that many people don't even consider discrimination. For example, many colleges and universities discriminate on the basis of GPAs for acceptance to various programs; this is legal. In the past, many colleges and universities discriminated against potential students on the basis of sex or race, which is now illegal.
Discriminatory pricing is a real thing. See this BuzzFeed video on discriminatory pricing as an example on how men's and women's products cost differently, even if the men's product consumes more raw material yet still costs less. However, it's illegal for hotels to charge different rates for their rooms, or for restaurants to charge unfairly or give preferential treatment; they are "public accommodations" protected under the various Civil Rights Acts. However, colleges are exempt from current laws, and it's not just tech colleges; even traditional colleges require different SAT scores for entry based on race and/or gender, and also charge different tuition. They are private accommodations and are therefore generally allowed to do this. For example, you'll have a much harder time getting in to Harvard if you're of a particular race, even if you can afford the tuition, simply because you'll be expected to have a higher SAT score. There was a class action lawsuit in California over this (the students were above 4.0 GPA, yet denied entry based on race), and as a result of law changes afterwards, California institutions can no longer do this. This is not the situation in the rest of the country, as no Federal law yet exists that protects minorities, gender, sexual orientation, etc, in regards to higher education. Also, sometimes merely proving a gap exists might not be noticeable, as companies are also starting to display pages on their websites based on data-mined information about visitors, possibly including information that would otherwise be discriminatory if it were done in person, and hiding the information from the general public. Discrimination is a difficult beast to tame, and until the law is introduced that all products and services must be offered to all consumers at the same price regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc, businesses will continue to find ways to discriminate in legal ways.