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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Seaman Barry Riley [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsA white South Carolina firefighter posted threats on Facebook that he would run over Black Lives Matters protesters. The fire department began receiving complaints about these posts. Plus, the posts violated various provisions of the employee handbook.…
Image by PixLoger from Pixabay But, first, I have a confession to make. I only read six posts. Over here at the Ohio Employer Law Blog, Jon Hyman writes about a federal district judge who dismissed a plaintiff’s hostile work environment claim notwithstanding evidence of “daily or near daily” harassment…