“It’s not fair”

Watch this, and then let’s talk about the word fair.

Is your company protected from insider cyber threats?

I’ve previously suggested that your employees are your company’s weakest link, and therefore, your greatest threat to suffering a cyber-attack and resulting data breach. While employee negligence (that is, employees not knowing or understanding how their actions risk your company’s data security) remains the biggest cyber risk, another is growing and also demands your attention—the malicious insider.

Dark Reading reports on a recent survey, entitled, “Monetizing the Insider: The Growing Symbiosis of Insiders and the Dark Web.”

How to defend *not* granting leave as a reasonable accommodation

Medical leaves of absence continue to confound employers. Under the ADA, an employer must consider an unpaid leave as a reasonable accommodation. An unpaid leave of some limited duration, however, will be reasonable in most cases.

When is an employer free to deny an employee’s request for a leave as an ADA accommodation? Let’s examine Williams v. AT&T Mobility Services (6th Cir. 1/27/17) for an answer.

The 3rd nominee for the “worst employer of 2017” is … the direct discriminator

Our next nominee for the Worst Employer of 2017 is the defendant in Mayes v. WinCo Holdings (9th Cir. 2/3/17) [pdf]—WinCo, a Bosie, Idaho, supermarket chain.

The plaintiff, Katie Mayes, a night-shift supervisor, was fired for taking a stale cake from the store bakery to share with fellow employees after management allegedly gave her permission to do so. That, however, is not what earned WinCo the nomination. Instead, it’s what the court found Mayes’s direct supervisor expressed about her (yes, her) belief about a woman running the night-shift:

WIRTW #447 (the “Gorsuch” edition)

Did you hear that Donald Trump appointed 10th Circuit Court of Appeal Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill to SCOTUS seat vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia? What have some of my blogging friends had to say about this appointment? Glad you asked.

• Gorsuch’s extra-judicial writing and speeches — via SCOTUSblog
• What President Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee Means for Employment Law Cases — via Jason Shinn’s Michigan Employment Law Advisor
• I wonder how Trump’s nominee, Neil Gorsuch, might decide a SCOTUS leave-accommodation ADA case. — via Eric Meyer’s The Employer Handbook Blog
• SCOTUS Nominee ‘Excellent’ Choice for Employers — via HR Daily Advisor
• Daily Trumpdate: Gorsuch seems to care about real people — via Robin Shea’s Employment & Labor Insider
• Judge Gorsuch is not Friendly to U.S. Workers — via San Antonio Employment Law Blog
• Where Does Gorsuch Stand on Tech and the Law? — via Technologist

Here’s the rest of what I read this week:

Ohio again tries to restore sanity to its bonkers employment discrimination law

It was almost one year ago to the day that I penned, Now is the time to restore balance to Ohio’s employment discrimination law: Endorsing the Employment Law Uniformity Act. I wrote:

For lack of more artful description, Ohio’s employment discrimination law is a mess. It exposes employers to claims for up to six years, renders managers and supervisors personally liable for discrimination, contains no less than four different ways for employees to file age discrimination claims (each with different remedies and filing deadlines), and omits any filing prerequisites with the state civil rights agency.

Last year’s attempt at this sanity restoration, Senate Bill 268, died at the end of 2016 with the expiration of the last legislative session.

Thankfully, however, House Bill 2 has resurrected this attempt. (And, yes, the irony that today is Groundhog Day is not lost on me.)

Does the FLSA cover unpaid “gap time”?

As we all should know, the Fair Labor Standards Act requires that employers pay non-exempt employees overtime at a rate of one and one-half times the regular rate of pay for any hours worked in excess of 40 in any given work week. And, it provides a remedy for an employee to sue for unpaid overtime (among other remedies).

What about gap time? “What is gap time,” you ask? It’s employment-law speak for unpaid straight time. Does the FLSA authorize a court to provide a remedy for unpaid straight time (for example, off-the-clock work that does not break the 40-hour weekly threshold)? Or, does the FLSA only authorize back pay for unpaid overtime?