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Rent-A-Center, a rent-to-own furniture chain, will pay $3 million to settle a class action lawsuit alleging that assistant managers in California were improperly classified as exempt from overtime because they only occasionally performed managerial duties. And in a separate lawsuit, about 1,200 California applicants and employees will share in a $2.1 million settlement of claims […]
Recently, we posted survey results from the Society of Human Resource Management showing that almost a third of respondents monitor employees’ use of social media platforms. Hopefully, they are also tracking the laws that could limit the extent of such monitoring. “Social media monitoring that runs afoul of the employee’s privacy interests will subject the […]
By BLR Founder and CEO Bob Brady Our first National Employee Attitude Survey report showed your workers were getting only about three-fourths of what they want from you. Well, we’re running it again, starting on February 8, 2008. It’s still free, but you may find the results priceless. Here’s the article I wrote about last […]
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has appointed a new labor commissioner, Angela Bradstreet, who previously served as the managing partner for San Francisco-based corporate law firm Carroll, Burdick & McDonough. As the new labor commissioner, Bradstreet will head up the Department of Industrial Relations, within the Labor and Workforce Development Agency.
The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has published final regulations that implement changes to some teen worker employment rules. Effective Feb. 15, the rules expand protections for minors working in certain industries and performing certain tasks. Note that California’s child labor rules generally incorporate the federal regulations.
Late Tuesday night, President Barack Obama signed the Temporary Extension Act of 2010 (H.R. 4691) into law. The bill, which passed the U.S. Senate by a 78-19 vote Tuesday night and passed the U.S. House of Representatives last week, extends the original federal COBRA subsidy created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 […]
In the latest example of the trend toward challenging the use of temporary workers by government and private employers, Ventura County’s largest labor union, the Service Employees International Union, has sued the county. The union charges that the county paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past year to temporary workers in clerical, maintenance […]
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration (PWBA) has just released its new enforcement strategy to ensure that pension plans comply with ERISA. The main target: defined contribution programs, particularly 401(k) plans. This means you could be hit with hefty penalties for pension plan administration errors, such as delinquent employee contributions and […]
The IRS and the Department of Treasury is still seeking public input on future standards to determine whether a retirement plan is a governmental plan under Code Section 414(d). According to the IRS, more guidance is needed for Section 414(d), as the statutory rules for governmental plans differ from those for nongovernmental plans. Further, changes […]
Employers may not have to adjust their qualified transportation fringe benefit programs after all — at least not just yet. A legislative provision that would have affected QTFBs by boosting the mass transit exclusion to the same level as that for qualified parking — the so-called “mass transit parity” provision — did not make it […]