On Friday, attorneys for over 500 current and former healthcare workers at a Midwest healthcare system announced that they had settled “the nation’s first classwide lawsuit” for employees alleging that they were unlawfully discriminated against and denied religious exemptions from a COVID shot mandate. Continue reading
Hey, don’t judge me. You’re just as heartless reading this as I am writing it.
Folks, someday, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) may darken your door to audit your books and records. Perhaps, they’ll find a violation and require you to pay back wages and liquidated damages. If your next steps involve retaliating against employees who cooperate with investigators and demanding kickbacks of back wages, you will compound those problems.
I told you so.
Earlier this week, The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released the results of a poll, which found that 67% of Americans support term limits for Supreme Court justices, including a majority of Democrats and Republicans. Continue reading
An employer fires an employee after the company has approved him for intermittent leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act. The employee begins taking leave in separate blocks of time for a single qualifying reason. Then, the employer fires the employee. So the employee claims FMLA interference.
What exactly is FMLA interference? How does an employee prove it? And what are some defenses? Continue reading
An individual who wants to bring federal disability discrimination and retaliation claims against an employer can’t just go right to court. No, courts would choke with employment lawsuits.
Instead, she must first exhaust her administrative remedies at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by filing a charge of discrimination. But there’s a little more to it than that. Continue reading
“This case is close,” reasoned a federal appellate court. Continue reading
Has anyone ever sued your business for violating the Fair Labor Standards Act? This federal law requires covered employers to pay minimum wage and overtime at time-and-a-half when employees work more than 40 hours in a workweek.
They can be expensive to defend — even the ones that aren’t collective (class) actions.
Who is my “source”?
I got the scoop from EEOC Commissioner Andrea Lucas, who updated us on LinkedIn over the weekend about a Tennessee federal judge who entered this preliminary injunction to stop the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from implementing this technical assistance document issued in June 2021 that purports to explain employers’ post-Bostock obligations under Title VII concerning dress codes, bathrooms, locker rooms, shows, and use of preferred pronouns or names.
So, where did the EEOC go awry? Continue reading
In August 2017, a flight attendant sued her employer and her union in federal court. The plaintiff would amend her complaint a few times. Among the claims that remained in the final version, the plaintiff alleged that both defendants violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating against Carter’s religious beliefs and practices.
How, you ask? Continue reading
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