WIRTW #98

Earlier this week I suggested 10 reasons why you shouldn’t date at work. Some of my fellow bloggers share their own thoughts on the David Letterman situation:

• Mark Toth’s Manpower Employment Blawg: Lessons from Letterman.
• Kris Dunn, The HR Capitalist: Dudes: Office Hook Up = Lifetime Threat of Being Leveraged.
• The Word on Employment Law with John Phillips: Letterman Gets Serious, Offers Defense.

In other news this week, On Point News reports that Playboy has settled a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by one of its former producers. If there was ever a place for an assumption of the risk defense in employment cases…

Nick Fishman, at the employeescreenIQ Blog, takes on diploma mills.

Sindy Warren, at the Warren & Hays Blog, offers some information on maternity leave under Ohio law. For my thoughts on this issue, take a look at Maternity leave issues continue to confound employers.

Workplace Horizons spots a potentially dangerous trend – tacking on civil RICO (racketeering) claims to wage and hour lawsuits.

Tim Eavenson, at Current Employment, draws some lessons on trade secrets from watching Sunday Night Football.

Rush Nigut’s Rush on Business shares how your child’s social networking can adversely affect your employment.

Michael Maslanka’s Work Matters thinks that “regarded as” disability claims will make a big comeback under the recently amended ADA.

Michael Haberman’s HR Observations examines some litigation recently filed by the EEOC and concludes that the agency may be targeting employer policies that arbitrarily try to limit the duration of employee medical leaves.

Molly DiBianca, at the Delaware Employment Law Blog, offers some good tips on how go about starting a social networking policy.

Patrick Smith, at the Iowa Employment Law Blog, reminds us of the dangers of retaliation.

Finally, Michael Fox, at Jottings by an Employer’s Lawyer, discusses an employment lawsuit that still has not ended after a 12 year trip through the court system.

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Presented by Kohrman Jackson & Krantz, with offices in Cleveland and Columbus. For more information, contact Jon Hyman, a partner in our Labor & Employment group, at (216) 736-7226 or jth@kjk.com.

Companies are banning social networking. Should you?

According to a recent survey by Robert Half Technology (courtesy of Tresa Baldas at law.com), more than half of employers completely prohibit their employees from visiting social networking sites during working time. The complete results are as follows:

	Prohibited completely	54%
	Permitted for business purposes only	19%
	Permitted for limited personal use	16%
	Permitted for any type of personal use	10%
	Don’t know/no answer	1%

I’ve been answering a lot of questions lately on social networking. It does not seem realistic to totally ban all social networking at work. To effectively implement a total prohibition you must either turn off internet access, install software to block certain sites, or monitor employees’ use and discipline offenders. These options, though, stifle business-related productivity, are expensive, or are time consuming. Do you really want all employees not to be able to access the internet for any purpose? Do you have the manpower to dedicate to around-the-clock monitoring of employees’ online activity?

The better option is to allow limited personal social networking during business hours. If you treat employees respectfully and professionally, in most cases they will return the courtesy. This is not to suggest that you act naively. You also need to have a social networking policy to cover those circumstances when employees abuse the privilege through excessive use or inappropriate postings. For more on drafting a social networking policy, read Drafting a social networking policy: 7 considerations.

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Presented by Kohrman Jackson & Krantz, with offices in Cleveland and Columbus. For more information, contact Jon Hyman, a partner in our Labor & Employment group, at (216) 736-7226 or jth@kjk.com.

Top 10 reasons not to date at work

By now, you’ve likely heard about David Letterman’s workplace trysts, the resulting blackmail, and his public embarrassment. In homage to Mr. Letterman’s place in the workplace shame hall of fame, I present the top 10 reasons why you shouldn’t date a workplace subordinate (drum roll please):

10. Love contracts.

9. Extortion and blackmail attempts.

8. Those uncomfortable conversations with HR and company attorneys explaining your love life.

7. Describing your private affairs in a deposition or, worse, to a jury.

6. Being the focus of office gossip.

5. Conflicts of interest.

4. The loss of respect from your co-workers and other subordinates.

3. Facing termination for not disclosing your romance.

2. Those pesky harassment and retaliation lawsuits when someone other than your paramour gets passed over for a promotion, fired, or otherwise thinks you are playing favorites.

1. Those pesky harassment or retaliation lawsuits by your ex when the relationship goes south.

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Presented by Kohrman Jackson & Krantz, with offices in Cleveland and Columbus. For more information, contact Jon Hyman, a partner in our Labor & Employment group, at (216) 736-7226 or jth@kjk.com.

Do you know? Wage and hour recordkeeping

The Fair Labor Standards Act sets certain requirements for what records an employer covered by the Act must keep. For non-exempt employees, an employer must maintain the following records:

1. Employee’s full name and social security number.
2. Address, including zip code.
3. Birth date, if younger than 19.
4. Sex and occupation.
5. Time and day of week when employee’s workweek begins.
6. Hours worked each day.
7. Total hours worked each workweek.
8. Basis on which employee’s wages are paid (e.g., “$9 per hour”, “$440 a week”, “piecework”)
9. Regular hourly pay rate.
10. Total daily or weekly straight-time earnings.
11. Total overtime earnings for the workweek.
12. All additions to or deductions from the employee’s wages.
13. Total wages paid each pay period.
14. Date of payment and the pay period covered by the payment.

For exempt employees, employers must keep the records for 1 – 5 and 13 – 14. Additionally, for exempt employees employers must also keep a record of the basis on which wages are paid in sufficient detail to permit calculation for each pay period of the employee’s total compensation.

Payroll records must be kept for three years. Records on which wage computations are based – time cards, wage rate tables, work and time schedules, and records of additions to or deductions from wages – must be kept for two years.

There is no particular form in which the records must be kept, as long as they are maintained and are available for inspection at the request of the Department of Labor.

Ohio has its own recordkeeping requirements, but as long as an employer is compliance with the federal standards should keep an employer compliant with Ohio’s standards.

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Presented by Kohrman Jackson & Krantz, with offices in Cleveland and Columbus. For more information, contact Jon Hyman, a partner in our Labor & Employment group, at (216) 736-7226 or jth@kjk.com.

What my vacation can teach you

I just returned from 8 days at Disney World. I’ve been trying to draw a great HR or employment law lesson from my trip to share with my readers. This is what I’ve come up with.

Everyone at Disney is happy. But it does not seem to be forced corporate happiness. It’s simply part of the culture. You may think, “If I got to go to work everyday with Mickey Mouse and Cinderella I’d be happy too.” I agree that part of the happiness has to do with the environment. But, I don’t think it’s necessarily the Florida sun or seeing Mickey that caused a janitor to stop, get down on his knees, and talk to my 14-month-old son until he got a smile.

I know your manufacturing plant isn’t the Magic Kingdom. But, it doesn’t mean that you can’t strive to find the key to your employees’ happiness. Happy employees work harder, complain less, and are more productive. Maybe it’s a bonus program, maybe it’s a randomly catered lunch, maybe it’s a manager giving a heart-felt thank you for a job well done. Whatever it is, you should search for that bit of magic that will make your employees happy and want to come to work everyday. The return you will receive will be greater than whatever the cost in time or money.

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Presented by Kohrman Jackson & Krantz, with offices in Cleveland and Columbus. For more information, contact Jon Hyman, a partner in our Labor & Employment group, at (216) 736-7226 or jth@kjk.com.

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