A victim of employment discrimination is entitled to all relief necessary to make him or her wholethat is, to place that individual, as nearly as possible, in the situation he or she would have been in if the discrimination had not occurred.
In order to make a victim of employment discrimination whole, courts may reinstate employees to their jobs but are often reluctant or unable to do so when the position is no longer available or a continued working relationship between the parties would be hostile. When reinstatement is inappropriate and the employee has no reasonable prospect of obtaining comparable alternative employment, a court may instead award front pay. Front pay is designed to account for wages and benefits that the employee would have earned if the employee were reinstated or hired into the higher-paying position from which he or she was illegally rejected.
