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Can They Do That? Firing Employees for Off-Duty Conduct

by T. Harold Pinkley Participating in last year’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—an event that involved several groups usually identified as the “alt-right,” along with groups protesting the marchers—has proven to have unforeseen and unintended consequences, including job loss, for some of the people involved. This article examines how you can or should […]

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What Is the Hollywood Model of Work?

Even if you’ve never been anywhere near a Hollywood studio, you can imagine that it takes hundreds of people to put together a movie—all with differing talents, each with expertise in their respective field. Different actors and directors (and all of the hundreds of other roles that come together to make a movie happen) come […]

teambuilding

Getting Big Projects Started Off on the Right Track

Initiating a big new project can be exciting for the person or team running the show. But it can also be a daunting task, and too often, projects with a lot of potential get derailed and are set up for failure from the very beginning.

small package

Good (Nontaxable) Things Come in Small Packages: The De Minimis Fringe Benefit Rule

Do you want to recognize an employee’s 20 years of service by giving a gift? Perhaps you want to refund local transportation costs or open a cafeteria so your employees can eat on-site. Maybe you just want to know how to handle those annual holiday turkeys you give to employees. All of these situations are […]

Would You Consider Restricting Hours Worked?

Employers know that there are legal restrictions in terms of the number of hours a nonexempt employee can work before incurring overtime pay. There are also restrictions on the hours a minor can work. And for safety reasons, there are restrictions on the number of consecutive hours medical residents and truck drivers can work.

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Maternity and Paternity Leave in the United States

Perhaps you’ve heard the statistics in the news lately: the United States lags behind most other nations in terms of how much guaranteed maternity and paternity leave is provided to employees. In fact, it shocks some people in other countries to learn that there is no mandated maternity and paternity leave at all!

Ask the Expert: How do we calculate monthly bonus payments for attendance into an employee’s pay rate for overtime purposes?

April 10, 2010 Under the federal FLSA, bonus payments are divided into discretionary and nondiscretionary types (29 USC 207; 29 CFR 778.211). Nondiscretionary bonuses are included in an employee’s regular rate of pay for the purpose of determining overtime, while discretionary bonuses are not included in an employee’s regular rate of pay to determine overtime. […]

stress

A Spectrum of Reasons for Failure

In recent posts, we discussed the concept of embracing failure, beginning with looking at the organizational benefits of doing so, as well as the risks of ignoring this failure. Next, we talked about strategies that can help use failure as a learning experience and then discussed three categories of failure in a follow-up post.