Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
Federal OSHA has published a new guide to help employers develop and implement an effective first-aid program. The “Best Practices Guide: Fundamentals of a Workplace First-Aid Program” lists the primary components of a workplace first-aid program at the workplace, including: identifying and assessing workplace risks, designing a program specific to the worksite and complying with […]
A health reform requirement that all insurers offer four levels of health coverage to small businesses will be delayed until 2015. Under a final rule from HHS (to be officially published June 4), many small employers will have fewer plans to choose from the Small Business Health Options (SHOP) program in 2014. Background Starting in 2014, small […]
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) has published final rules regarding compliance with the nondiscrimination provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for wellness programs. The rules will be effective on the first day of the plan year beginning on or after July 1, 2007. For calendar year […]
The U.S. Supreme Court has handed down a unanimous ruling that permits employees to prove job bias by showing that the employer’s stated reason for termination or other adverse action was false. This is an important decision, although how it will impact California employers isn’t yet clear.
We earlier reported on a California appeals court ruling thata class action alleging that Sav-On Drug Stores misclassified managers as exempt from overtime couldn’t proceed. The court’s reasoning was that whether or not each manager was properly classified as exempt was an issue that was individual to each store and therefore couldn’t bedecided on a […]
An employee discovers her boss is having a sexual relationship with a co-worker. Then, when the co-worker gets favorable treatment, including questionable promotions, the employee comes after you, charging that the boss’s favoritism amounted to sex discrimination and created a hostile work environment. Open-and-shut case for the employee? Maybe not, according to a new decision.
The HR Hero Line you are seeing today isn’t exactly what we had planned. But by noon on what is now being called “Bloody Monday,” we knew we needed to address the fallout from so many job cut announcements, which were then followed on Tuesday by possibly the worst unemployment report from the U.S. Bureau […]
As the government fulfills its promise to create an essential benefit package, employers can be forgiven for thinking the government’s putting a competitor plan out there to lure plan members away from employer-sponsored plans. And it is tempting for them to just say: “Fine! You asked for it; no more funding health benefits!” But paradoxically […]
The U.S. Supreme Court announced on Monday that it would hear arguments in a case involving sexually explicit text messages sent by employees using their employer-provided pagers. The issue for the court is whether the employer violated its employees’ privacy rights by reading the messages. The case involved several police officers with the Ontario, California, […]
Rooting out the more subtle types of FMLA abuse takes diligence and tracking leave patterns can be time consuming and expensive. Here are 10 tips for employers. Click here to read more