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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 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) held a half-day program on January 27, 2026, focused on employee noncompetes. The FTC indicated its intent to pursue prosecution of agreements that violate antitrust or otherwise inappropriately limit employee choice. However, the commission is not reproposing the prior rule banning all noncompetes. If workers have issues, the agency suggests […]
St. Louis employers aren’t facing a phased-in $11 minimum wage now that a state judge has struck down a local ordinance that would have given the city a higher minimum wage than the rest of Missouri. The current minimum wage in Missouri is $7.65 per hour, 40 cents higher than the federal minimum wage of […]
By BLR Founder and CEO Bob Brady For anyone needing job description help, our CEO announces something that’s not quite the Ultimate Answer to Life’s Questions … but it’s close. Longtime readers of this column know I like to use it to communicate to all 130,000 of you out there. Most of the time, it’s […]
You’ve undoubtedly seen it in the news: Last week, Jing Hua Wu, a Santa Clara engineer, shot and killed three people at work—the company’s head of HR, the VP of operations, and the chief executive—after being let go.
Fears of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation taking people’s jobs are increasingly common as new technologies emerge that seem to make many aspects of certain jobs—especially routine, low-skilled labor jobs—potentially obsolete. We’ve written a lot about how these fears are often overblown.
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 […]
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 […]
Employers may soon be able to screen out applicants who have a history of stealing. A private database called TheftNet lists workers who have admitted or been convicted of workplace theft or shoplifting from participating employers. Although TheftNet is currently available only to very large companies, plans are under way to make the information accessible […]