The company had an anti-harassment policy, trained its employee-relations manager to investigate complaints, and opened one. Then it assigned the accused supervisor to counsel the employee who complained about him.
Calling a termination a reduction in force does not make the selection process disappear. If the paper trail cannot explain the choice, a jury may get the opportunity to examine it.
The DOL has finally answered the workplace question keeping America awake: May employees take home a puppy without bringing home an overtime claim? Please remain calm: the puppies are fine.
A supervisor can tend bar, cover tables, and help bus dishes. But under a DOL opinion letter, performing tipped work does not necessarily earn that employee a share of other employees’ tips.
Apparently, even the walk to lunch can become a federal wage-and-hour question. The answer depends less on the distance traveled than on what remains when employees arrive.
An accommodation does not become unreasonable merely because the employee would rather save it for vacations and family emergencies.
TL;DR: A federal employee experiencing depression and cardiac arrhythmia requested unpaid leave, a lateral transfer, or other help. Her employer offered flexible use of approximately 240 hours of accrued paid leave and, when no comparable position was available, a lower-level job. The Eleventh Circuit affirmed summary judgment for the employer because the employee received reasonable options, even if they were not the ones she preferred.
A 25-minute meeting in Spanish allegedly became a two-sentence summary in English. That may be a workplace communication problem, but this court did not see race or national-origin discrimination.
The employer approved light duty. Seventeen days later, it fired the pregnant employee over an alleged policy violation from two months earlier.
A job applicant told a polygraph examiner that she consumed ayahuasca as part of her religion. An agency adjudicator labeled it “recent illegal drug use,” and the tentative job offer disappeared.
The employer thought it had caught an employee lying in an EEOC charge. Then it put that conclusion in the termination notice.
That second decision cost considerably more than the first. Continue reading
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