Must individuals who are fully vaccinated (i.e., have received both vaccine doses) against COVID-19 quarantine if they have been in close contact with someone who has a confirmed case of the virus?
"Ten doses of the Covid-19 vaccine would expire within hours, so a Houston doctor gave it to people with medical conditions, including his wife." So reads the lede in this New York Times story.
What happened next? He was fired.
The CDC just updated its masking guidelines, now recommending that individuals wear two masks—a well-fitting surgical mask underneath a cloth mask. Should you be recommending or requiring the same for your business, both for employees and visitors?
“I’m here live, I’m not a cat,” says lawyer after Zoom filter mishap
— Lawrence Hurley (@lawrencehurley) February 9, 2021
“I can see that,” responds judge pic.twitter.com/HclKlAUwbM
While this story provided everyone a much-needed laugh, it does offer two important points: one about a lawyer's ethical duty of technological competence, and another about the importance of a sense of humor and empathy.
At some point over the next few months, some (most?) of your employees will receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Depending on the rules of your state, the nature of your business, and the age or medical issues of your employees, some may already have. I've previous covered the legal issues surrounding the vaccine, here, here, and here. Today I want to cover a practical issue—time-off related to the vaccination.
For the past three years, the Department of Labor has been trying to get employees PAID for their unpaid overtime and minimum wages. That's PAID, as in the Payroll Audit Independent Determination program, a creation of the Trump administration that allowed employers to self-report FLSA violations to the Department of Labor without risk of litigation, enforcement proceedings, or liquidated damages.
The headline reads, "Trump aides made a late request to Team Biden to extend their parental leave. They said no." Here's the story:[A] number of ex-Trump political officials … lost their parental leave when Joe Biden was sworn into office. It's a byproduct of the field they're in: Their boss (the president) may have been the one let go, but his departure has meant that they, too, lose their jobs and benefits. Still, they argue that the Biden administration should have honored their leave by keeping them on payroll until the end of it — a request that … the Biden transition did not grant.
According to Vice, people are using photo editing software to doctor COVID test results. "I just fired up photoshop and changed the date," wrote one man who had doctored results for an entire group of friends to Motherboard. "Fun fact, the document [test result] was in French whereas they were in Sweden the day it was supposedly made, but they didn't see a problem in that."
The other person took a slightly less sophisticated route and changed the date of an old test with Microsoft Paint for his vacation to Southern Europe.
Not distinguishing between workers who are vaccinated and those who are not: Workers who are vaccinated must continue to follow protective measures, such as wearing a face covering and remaining physically distant, because at this time, there is not evidence that COVID-19 vaccines prevent transmission of the virus from person-to-person. The CDC explains that experts need to understand more about the protection that COVID-19 vaccines provide before deciding to change recommendations on steps everyone should take to slow the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19.
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to answer these questions:- Whether an employee's exposure to the N-word in the workplace is severe enough to send his Title VII hostile-work-environment claim to a trier of fact.
- Whether and in what circumstances racial epithets in the workplace are "extremely serious" incidents sufficient to create a hostile work environment under Title VII, rather than nonactionable "mere utterances."
Welcome back to New Music Friday. Today, I'm so happy to share my 14-year-old daughter's first-ever single, "Wish I Was Ur Guitar." Goya Foods CEO Bob Unanue tells Maria Bartiromo how coronavirus was used for “ushering in the dawn of a new world order, this Great Reset, with an unverified election,” falsely claims 80 million people voted for Trump. “There is a war coming.”
— Eric Kleefeld (@EricKleefeld) January 20, 2021
Maybe rename the company “MyBeans”? pic.twitter.com/Kw8WXoTBLg
To a nation waiting for action, let me be clearest on this point: Help is on the way.
Meet Awon Phie LLC, which operates a Holiday Inn Express in Corpus Chrisi, Texas, our third nominee for the "Worst Employer of 2021." How did it earn its nomination? According to a lawsuit the EEOC filed against it, three weeks after hiring an employee to work as a housekeeper, the company's operations manager, noticing her stomach, told her she was a "liability" because of her pregnancy, that she couldn't employ a pregnant woman, and fired her.
Late last week, President Biden signaled that part of his overall plan to provide economic relief for American families and businesses amid the COVID-19 crisis is to broaden the availability of unemployment benefits to employees who quit their jobs related to Covid.
Among the litany of executive orders President Biden issued in his first two days in office was one on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation. It's a beautiful statement adopting as the policy of the federal government the Supreme Court's decision in Bostock that Title VII's definition of sex explicitly includes LGBTQ employees.
One of the great benefits of this blog is the opportunities it has opened for me to network with others. One of the great benefits of that networking is the ability to sometimes have my voice heard on other platforms. Today, I offer for your listening pleasure two podcasts on which I've recently appeared, the HR Social Hour Half Hour Podcast, and the Tech Leader's Toolbox Podcast.
