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The Supreme Court on Tuesday adopted a broad reading of two federal civil rights laws to protect employees from retaliation when they complain about discrimination in the workplace.

Retaliation complaints are a growing subset of workplace discrimination cases, because it is often easier for employees to demonstrate that they were retaliated against than that they were victims of discrimination in the first place. Retaliation complaints filed annually with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission doubled in the last 15 years, to 22,000 from 11,000.

Congress has provided explicit protection against retaliation in two major federal statutes. One is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race and sex. The other is the provision of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act that applies in the private sector.

But there is no such explicit protection in the portion of the age discrimination law that applies to federal government workers. Nor is there explicit language in a post-Civil War era statute that gives “all persons” the same right “as is enjoyed by white citizens” when it comes to making and enforcing contracts, such as contracts of employment. Those were the two statutes that the court interpreted on Tuesday.