Image by tigerlily713 from Pixabay In 2012, the EEOC issued its Enforcement Guidance on the Consideration of Arrest and Conviction Records in Employment Decisions Under Title VII. The purpose of the Guidance was to help eliminate barriers in recruitment and hiring to ensure that companies running these background checks weren’t…
Articles Posted in Discrimination and Unlawful Harassment
When do (or don’t) Facebook posts create a hostile work environment?
By Nut-hardware.jpg: Muke derivative work: Xoristzatziki (talk) – Nut-hardware.jpg, Public Domain, Link I can tell you this. It takes more than a few posts from a couple of ‘Wingnuts.’ Some mean-spirited Facebook posts. The plaintiff, in this case, worked for a unionized airline. The plaintiff ran to become the union president.…
Blame it on the a a a a a alcohol
Image by Social Butterfly from Pixabay When can you ask an employee if s/he has a problem with alcohol? The answer is almost never. But, one company recently dodged a major bullet after asking an employee whether he had a drinking problem and questions about his drinking in general. Using…
Are you an HR department of one? The EEOC has your back with this great free resource.
Image by Mediamodifier from Pixabay I don’t envy you. If I were an HR department of one, I’d crash and burn. To wit, no one has ever accused me of putting the ‘human’ into human resources. I don’t know how you juggle so many balls at once. But, I imagine…
How many things can you find wrong with this picture?
Remember those “what’s wrong with this picture” games that we played as children? Something like this. Last night, I found the employment law equivalent from this recent Sixth Circuit opinion. [tl;dr: A colossal series of HR-compliance gaffes leads to a whopper of a jury verdict against the employer, which includes…
Filling out those EEO-1s stinks. But, it could be worse…
By U.S. Government – Extracted from PDF file here., Public Domain, Link I want to give a little shoutout to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, with whom I am spending the day today in Atlanta at the 22nd annual Examining Conflicts in Employment Laws (EXCEL) Training Conference. So, today’s post…
Does over-accommodating an employee’s disability expose your business to ADA claims?
By Flickr user Tyler Silvest Wikideas1 (talk) 21:43, 7 November 2016 (UTC) – Here, CC BY 2.0, Link Well, it could. But, will the plaintiff win? That’s a different story. In this case, an employer accommodated an employee with chronic back pain for a long time. How long? Like 22…
Harassment training entirely via text message. Could this actually work?
Image by fajar budiman from Pixabay Yesterday, I received an unsolicited email from a company called Pluto. Pluto claims to offer a text message harassment training course that helps startups get compliant in less than 5 minutes a day. So, I headed over to the Pluto website to learn more. Here…
Can sexual harassment investigations create an intolerable and hostile work environment for the harasser?
Image Credit: Photofunia.com (http://photofunia.com/results/5d37ca3746867947238b45bf) Sympathetic: sym·pa·thet·ic /ˌsimpəˈTHedik/ adjective feeling, showing, or expressing sympathy. synonyms: commiserating, commiserative, pitying, condoling, consoling, comforting, supportive, encouraging antonyms: unsympathetic, unfeeling Let’s use sympathetic in a sentence. “Juries are generally sympathetic to individuals who claim to have been sexually harassed at work.” Let’s try one more.…
The case of Al Franken and why good workplace investigations are so darn important
Вени Марковски [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons Yesterday, The New Yorker published Jane Mayer’s piece entitled “The Case of Al Franken,” which is “a close look at the accusations against the former senator.” TL;DR Instead, I started listening to the audio version of Ms. Mayer’s story and made it…