Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
By Elaine Quayle If you are planning on flying to your vacation site, you may not want to read about the behavior of some pilots and controllers during work hours. You’ve seen the video of air traffic controllers glued to their screens in total concentration. Unfortunately, they may be watching movies, playing video games, or […]
After two years of implementing health reform’s “insurance mandates,” American businesses are now thinking about unraveling the arrangements they put in place to respond to it, in the waning days before the U.S. Supreme Court decides on the constitutionality of the individual mandate. Health reform is going to pose compliance challenges for American businesses whether […]
Plan administrators must distribute funds even when there is a dispute between an estate and an ex-spouse who waived beneficiary rights, says the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It recently ruled in Kensinger v. URL Pharma, 674 F. 3d 131 (March 20, 2012) that a decedent’s estate could directly sue the recipient of ERISA-governed […]
A Cautionary Tale—How Many Zeros? One juror explained the simple system his jury had used to determine the amount of punitive damages they would award: they started with one dollar, and added a zero for each thing they thought the employer had done wrong. The total added up pretty fast. How do employers get into […]
However, warns Evelyn Gentry, Faegre Baker Daniels LLP, there are downsides for employers that use unpaid interns, the most notable being potential violations of the FLSA. Misclassifying employees as unpaid interns, and thereby denying them federal minimum wage and overtime wages can result in costly litigation, civil fines, or both. Furthermore, employers who willfully violate […]
Yesterday’s Advisor discussed types of compensation that must be included in the “regular rate” and the subsequent recalculation of overtime that must be done. Today, the five types of compensation that generally do not have to be included in when calculating the “regular rate” of pay, plus news of a timely webinar on pay practices. […]
Exempt Employees and Disasters Exempt employees are generally paid their normal amount if the workday is shortened. Docking, or reducing pay of exempt employees who are scheduled to work, but who do not because of an emergency, may affect the employees’ status of being exempt from overtime, because, by docking, you are treating them like […]
If you have an employee who is bipolar, is that considered to be a disability? Must you provide an accommodation for work? In a CER webinar titled “Bipolar Employees: HR’s Legal and Practical Accommodation Roadmap,” Maureen Duffy, Susan G. Fentin, and Tom Wootton outlined some of the potential frustrations of having a bipolar employee, and […]
Employees who do two different types of tasks may be paid different hourly rates during the workweek. Or, an employee may work in two or more different positions during the same workweek at different rates of pay. But how do you calculate the overtime? The general rule is that all hours worked in all positions […]
As you must know by now, regardless of how the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the federal health care reform, a couple of very large insurers announced they would continue several of health reform’s insurance mandates. The impact of this announcement directly applies to companies that buy full insurance. But self-insured plans and employers big enough […]