Two months. If you want to assert a claim for compensation or damages because of discrimination at work, the AGG — the Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz, Germany’s General Equal Treatment Act — gives you two months from the incident to do it, in writing, to your employer (§ 15 AGG). Most people who contact us learn about this deadline for the first time when it has already passed. That is why it opens this article instead of being buried in the middle.
The deadline matters even if you want nothing to do with courts. Keeping the option alive can be simple. Losing it is permanent. Everything below is sequenced around that fact.
First, the part that does not fit in a timeline: what happened was not a misunderstanding you failed to manage. Anger, numbness, and disorientation are normal responses to being treated as less. You do not have to be calm about it to be strategic about it.
One frame before the steps: this article is general information, not legal advice for your case. The deadlines described here are the general rules; your situation may differ, and an advice service can tell you what applies to you.
Step 1 — The first 48 hours: write, don’t decide
Memory of exact words decays within days, and exact words are what carry weight later. Before you decide anything at all, record:
- Date, time, place of the incident.
- The exact words used, as close to verbatim as you can manage — in the original language.
- Who was present and who could have heard or seen.
- What changed around the incident: a shift assignment, a withdrawn project, a tone.
- How it affected you, in one or two honest sentences.
Date the note itself. Do the same for earlier incidents while you remember them — discrimination at work is rarely a single event, and a dated series is far more telling than one entry.
Secure copies of what already exists and is legitimately yours to hold: emails to you, chat messages, your duty rosters, your performance reviews. Don’t go hunting through systems you have no normal access to — that can be turned against you.
Two things not to do in the first 48 hours: don’t resign, and don’t send the furious message. Both are understandable. Both close doors you may want open in week three.
Step 2 — The first two weeks: external advice before internal complaint
This ordering is the single most useful thing in this article. An internal complaint, once filed, shows your hand: it fixes your account, starts the employer’s process on the employer’s terms, and changes the temperature of your working day. External advice does none of that. It is confidential, it costs nothing, and it leaves every option open.
Where to get it:
- A Beratungsstelle — an anti-discrimination advice centre. Most regions have one; they advise free of charge, in several languages, and they have seen your situation before.
- The Antidiskriminierungsstelle des Bundes, the federal anti-discrimination agency, which provides initial legal orientation.
- Your Gewerkschaft (trade union), if you’re a member — union legal protection can carry an entire labour-court case.
An adviser will help you sort three questions you should not have to sort alone: What does the law cover here? What are the deadlines in your case? And what do you actually want — the conduct to stop, an apology, a transfer, compensation, an exit on good terms? Strategies differ wildly depending on the answer, and “I just want it to stop” is a complete and respectable answer.
Step 3 — Know the two clocks
- Two months (§ 15 AGG): the deadline to assert compensation or damages claims for discrimination, in writing, to your employer. The written assertion — the Geltendmachung — does not commit you to suing anyone. It preserves the claim. An adviser can help you word it; further court deadlines follow after it, and the adviser will map those too.
- Three weeks (Kündigungsschutzgesetz): if you are dismissed, you have three weeks from receiving the Kündigung (written notice of dismissal) to challenge it at the Arbeitsgericht, the labour court. This clock runs independently of everything else and is unforgiving.
If both clocks are somehow running at once, the three-week one wins your attention first.
Step 4 — Choose your route inside the company
The Beschwerdestelle. Under § 13 AGG every employer must designate a complaints body, and you have the right to complain to it; the complaint must be examined and the outcome communicated to you. In practice this is often a function of HR — which brings us to the question we are asked most: should I report it to HR?
The honest answer: HR works for the employer. That doesn’t make HR useless — a written complaint creates a paper trail, obliges the employer to act, and is sometimes exactly what stops the conduct. It does mean you should file it with your eyes open, after external advice, and in writing. State facts and dates, quote the exact words, name the witnesses, say what you want to happen, and keep a copy with proof of when you submitted it. Avoid adjectives; the quoted words are damning enough on their own. Why internal complaint systems so often disappoint, and how they tend to protect the organization rather than the complainant, is its own subject — Women’s Equity Alliance has a clear-eyed piece on exactly that, and we won’t duplicate it here.
The Betriebsrat. If your workplace has a works council, it has real rights under the Betriebsverfassungsgesetz (Works Constitution Act) and can take up your complaint, accompany you to meetings, and pressure the employer. Quality varies from excellent to indifferent — an exploratory conversation costs you nothing and tells you which one you have.
Two route boundaries worth naming. If what you are experiencing is sexual harassment, or sits at the intersection of racism and sexism, the dynamics around confidentiality, witnesses, and internal processes have their own logic — Women’s Equity Alliance covers that ground specifically, and their guidance should lead. And if you discover that colleagues are experiencing the same treatment, you are no longer in an individual-complaint situation but a collective one, which changes both your leverage and your risks — Fair Work & Workers’ Rights Collective’s work on organizing carefully under fear of reprisal is the right map for that road.
Step 5 — Retaliation: realism and self-protection
§ 16 AGG prohibits your employer from penalizing you for complaining — the Maßregelungsverbot. You should know it exists. You should also know that retaliation rarely arrives wearing a sign. It looks like a schedule quietly rearranged, a project that goes elsewhere, invitations that dry up, a sudden interest in your punctuality.
A composite example — details changed: Sevgi asked, in writing, why she was the only person on her team not moved onto a permanent contract. Within a month her schedule shrank from five shifts a week to three. Nothing was ever said. What made her position defensible was boring paperwork: she had her old rosters, she had the new ones, and she had the dated email she’d sent in between.
That is the method. Document your before now — duties, hours, evaluations — so any after is visible against it. Keep logging incidents the same way you logged the first one. Put questions in writing and keep the answers. If the slide has already started, take the pattern to your adviser quickly: retaliation after a complaint is itself a violation, but it is far easier to act on when the record shows the staircase, step by step.
Step 6 — The longer arc
If the internal route fails or was never viable, the labour court remains, with your two-month assertion preserving the claim and an adviser or lawyer alongside — and if money is the barrier, Beratungshilfe and Prozesskostenhilfe (state legal-aid schemes for advice and court costs) exist for exactly this. Some people litigate and win. Some litigate and find the process costly in ways no judgment repairs. Some negotiate an exit, and some decide that leaving for a workplace that doesn’t require this fight is the best version of winning. Every one of these is a legitimate ending. You decide — that is not a slogan but the operating principle of everything above.
Do not carry it alone. The supports are practical: an anti-discrimination Beratungsstelle for strategy, your union for legal muscle, the Betriebsrat for inside leverage, Women’s Equity Alliance where sexual harassment is part of the picture, Fair Work & Workers’ Rights Collective where colleagues are in it with you, and throughout all of it, your own dated, boring, devastating notes.
