“Clairvoyance,” that’s a 10th-grade word. Let me Google it just in case. Ok, we’re good. We’re taught, and by “we,” I mean our managers. And by “taught,” I mean “cross our fingers that they were paying attention during training,” that an employee does not need to say the words “Family…
May is Mental Health Month. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, which enforces the Family and Medical Leave Act, just dropped some additional resources for workers on their rights to take leave for serious mental health conditions and for employers to better understand how to comply with…
Last night, I went through my Google Drive of older cases about which I had intended to blog but never gotten around to it. And I found this Fifth Circuit Family and Medical Leave Act decision involving a company that fired an employee two months into his leave. The issue…
If you operate a business in a state that has a family and medical leave law, be careful when that state law does not overlap precisely with the Family and Medical Leave Act. For example, in New Jersey, a/k/a the California of the East, an employee can get job-protected leave…
“Oh, word?” — none of you, hopefully. The Family and Medical Leave Act states that an eligible employee “shall be entitled to a total of twelve workweeks of leave during any twelve-month period” for several qualifying reasons. When I look up the word “shall” in the dictionary, it says, “used…
(Allegedly.) Three lies and no baby. According to a Georgia Office of the Inspector General (OIG), a state employee informed HR that she was pregnant in October 2020. Seven months later, in May 2021, she announced that she had given birth. The employer later received an email from an individual claiming…
I had this great post planned for today about the millions of American workers who skip work the day after the Super Bowl — and what employers can do (legally) to address it. Then, I remembered that I wrote about it back in 2020. So, since I’m feeling lazy pragmatic,…
People ask me if I like to read. Not so much anymore, outside of reading Harry Potter books to my kids and reading graphic novels (ok, fine, comic books) to me. Social media apps like LinkedIn have eroded my attention span. I can barely make it through a few hundred…
Print this post if you want to discourage your managers and supervisor from putting dumb sh*t in emails that might one day get shown to a jury and end up costing your business a mint. Last night, I read this opinion from a federal judge in Wisconsin. It’s about an…
Image Credit: pxfuel.com I’ll wait while you clean your screen of the coffee you just spewed from your mouth. Here’s a not-so-hypothetical situation: You’re a compensation and benefits manager working out of Connecticut. One of your employees — let’s call her Plaintiff — lives in Delaware but works at a…