Simon Seeding & Sod, Inc. v. Dubuque Human Rights Commission and Jermaine Stapleton

WATERMAN, Justice.

In this appeal, we must decide how to count employees to reach the threshold “numerosity” required to apply a local civil rights ordinance to a small business. The Dubuque ordinance, with language matching the Iowa Civil Rights Act (ICRA), exempts “any employer who regularly employs less than four individuals.” The defendant, a landscaper whose hiring needs fluctuate seasonally, denies it met this threshold under its proposed formula of counting only workers who had been employed for twenty consecutive weeks. The Dubuque Human Rights Commission (DHRC) rejected the employer’s…