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The Employer Handbook BlogDid an employee just discover an “FMLA loophole” to arbitration agreements?!?
Grab your pearls for clutching, and let’s get into this recent federal court decision to find out. Continue reading
“You have done nothing wrong. I am just following orders in building a new, younger team for the CEO.”
If you’re 67 years old, you work in human resources, and you happen to hear those words from the company’s U.S. president, it may be time to dust off the old resume.
Or contact the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Continue reading
PRO-TIP: If you want to arbitrate employment claims, have an arbitration agreement.
A client embroiled in an employment dispute with a former employee once asked me if we could force the employee into arbitration. So, I asked the client for a copy of the arbitration agreement that the individual had signed.
After an uncomfortably long pause, I went back to drafting the complaint to be filed in court. Continue reading
The EEOC isn’t the only federal agency safeguarding complaints about race bias at work
Last week, the National Labor Relations Board made headlines when it concluded that nondisparagement and confidentiality provisions in severance agreements that businesses give to rank-and-file employees are unlawful.
Yesterday, the Board made headlines again by releasing this Advice Memo in which it concluded that employees who engage in group discussions about issues of race that black employees face at work, including perceived implicit bias work, are protected from retaliation by employers. Continue reading
No job description? No problem. See why this employer had no duty to accommodate.
The Americans with Disabilities Act bars employers from firing someone because they have a disability. It also requires employers to provide workplace accommodations to otherwise “qualified” individuals with actual disabilities unless going so would create an undue hardship. Someone who is “qualified” can perform the job’s essential functions with or without an accommodation.
Put another way, if the employee can’t do the job with or without help, then the ADA doesn’t protect them – as one employee recently found out the hard way. Continue reading
Documentation and communication FTW! (Well, good enough.)
After completing a 90-day orientation program for newly licensed nurses, a woman was denied a full-time position as a Registered Nurse (RN) at a hospital and, instead, transferred into a lower-paying position at another facility that the same employer operated.
The woman — we’ll call her “Plaintiff” as we usually do here — alleged race discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
A plaintiff asserting a Title VII claim for race discrimination must present a convincing mosaic to the factfinder that race motivated the adverse employment action — in this case, the denial of the full-time RN position.
This employee apparently doesn’t understand how pregnancy discrimination works
I won’t bury the lede. Here’s the takeaway from this post. If an employer doesn’t know that an employee is pregnant, it can’t possibly discriminate against her because she is pregnant. Continue reading
How can an employee make $200K, PLUS overtime?!? The Supreme Court explains…
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
A company operating an offshore oil rig paid one of its “tool pushers” anywhere from $963 to $1,341 per day. His paycheck, issued every two weeks, amounted to his daily rate times the number of days he had worked in the pay period. So if the employee had worked only one day, his paycheck would total (at the range’s low end) $963; but if he had worked all 14 days, his paycheck would come to $13,482. Under that compensation scheme, the company paid the employee over $200,000 annually, with no overtime compensation.
But, the employee who supervised many others and otherwise satisfied the duties tests for the executive exemption under the Fair Labor Standards Act sued for unpaid overtime because, he claimed, the company failed to guarantee him at least $455 per week in salary. Continue reading
I’m willing to bet that, as of yesterday, most of your severance agreements are UNLAWFUL
On February 21, the National Labor Relations Board decided (here) that nondisparagement and confidentiality provisions in a severance agreement that businesses give to employees are unlawful. Continue reading
Are you in the clear waiting four weeks to fire someone who complained about sexual harassment?
I’ve got some ‘splaining to do before we get into the meat and potatoes. Continue reading