Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
A trial judge has turned the tables on a lawyer who failed to convince a jury that the law firm in which she was a partner had refused to accommodate her pregnancy. Finding that Shari Cohen Rosenman’s lawsuit was unreasonable, the court ordered her to pay $231,000 toward the attorney’s fees and costs of the […]
A record damage award levied against a telephone company that tried to prevent operators from speaking Spanish to each other in the workplace underscores the risks of enforcing English-only policies. Faced with this increasingly common type of bias case, a federal court has concluded that the language restriction amounted to illegal discrimination based on national […]
On June 30, the Industrial Welfare Commission held its final hearing to vote on a number of outstanding overtime and other wage and hour issues. The items addressed relate to new wage orders, which spell out rules for various industries and occupations. We’ll summarize the latest IWC developments that will impact many California employers.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Wage and Hour Division (WHD) issued Administrator’s Interpretation (AI) No. 2013-1, which can be found at www.dol.gov/whd/opinion/adminintrprtn/fmla/2013/fmlaai2013_1.htm. The AI clarifies that the age of onset of a disability is irrelevant when determining whether an employee is entitled to take leave to care for an adult son […]
I learned something last week. If you read a youngster’s text messages, you’ll notice a complicated system of abbreviations, symbols, and symaphores that, when translated with your 7-year-old’s assistance, become more-or-less coherent English sentences. Anyway, I learned “SMH” means “shaking my head,” which is exactly what I do these days when I hear the words […]
As the earthquake that shook Washington, D.C., area today demonstrates, damage to your primary place of business can occur suddenly and without warning. Having a crisis management plan on the ready is essential to minimizing the interruption to your business. The business continuity plan improves the company’s capacity to return to business, thereby minimizing financial […]
Is every employee who makes a formal complaint considered a “whistleblower”? The federal District Court says no. Mark Shulthies, a long time Amtrak employee working in California, sent an email to his supervisor complaining that the company’s decision to reorganize certain aspects of its service between the Bay Area and Bakersfield posed a “danger to […]
Mandatory agreements to arbitrate employment disputes are one of the most controversial workplace topics. Court decisions have been inconsistent, and arbitration language that is valid today may not hold up tomorrow. Yet little is known about how widely arbitration agreements are actually used.
by Michael B. Leahy Recently, our colleagues in California brought a shady — and possibly criminal — Web-based reference service to our attention. What we saw shocked us. HR Guide to Employment Law: A practical compliance reference manual covering 14 topics, including hiring Every excuse in the book! CareerExcuse.com supplies fraudulent job references to employers […]
If you run a smaller firm and pay an insurance company to cover your workers’ health, one of your top concerns is probably how to control spiraling health insurance expenses. Just two or three major health expenditures can cause your insurer to radically increase your premiums. And if you’re located in a part of the […]