WIRTW #690: the “Lou-Lou-Lou-Lou-Loula” edition

On the latest episode of The Norah and Dad Show, Norah and I remember Loula, our beloved vizsla who died last week. Different people deal with grief and loss in different ways; for me, talking about her helped me deal with my grief, a lot.

You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Overcast, Castro (my podcast player of choice), on the web, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Rest periods v. Meal periods

Do you know the difference between a break period and a meal period during an employee's work day? It's an important distinction because one does not count as working time, while the other does.

Federal law does not require an employer to grant employees rest or meal periods during the work day. (Some states do require them depending on the total number of hours worked; mine, however, does not.)

Federal law does, however, provide for whether meal and rest breaks are counted as "hours worked." This distinction is important. If time is counted as "hours worked," it goes into the calculation of time worked during the work week for consideration of whether the employee has crossed the 40-hour threshold for overtime pay.

The one thing your business can do right now to cut your potential FLSA liability in half

Q: What is the one thing that your business can do RIGHT NOW to cut your potential FLSA liability in half?

A: Hire an employment lawyer to conduct a wage and hour audit.

Case in point: Hendricks v. Total Quality Logistics.

After 13(!) years of litigation, a federal judge recently ruled that TQL violated the Fair Labor Standards Act and must pay unpaid overtime to thousands of misclassified employees.

The judge also ruled that TQL must pay statutory liquidated damages under the FLSA in an amount to the unpaid overtime because TQL did not establish that it acted in good faith in (mis)classifying its employees.

How bad do wage and violations have to be for a federal judge to order you to sell your business? This bad.

A federal district court judge has ordered the owners and operators of 14 Subway restaurants to pay employees nearly $1 million in back wages and damages and further ordered them to sell or shut down their businesses within 60 days.

The wage and hour violations included:

Loula.

Thursday night, we made the very difficult decision to let our beloved family member, Loula Mae, go.

It was one of the hardest decisions we've ever had to make as a family.

She had too many not good things happening inside of her. After two days of testing the vet had no idea why her red blood cell levels kept dropping and not regenerating. There were also suspected cancer cell from a substantial mass that had suddenly formed under her armpit, which had quickly spread across her chest and down to her belly. The preliminary diagnosis was either cancer bleeding to her body causing the anemia, or the cancer triggering an autoimmune amenia.

Either way, all of the potentials were various degrees of awful. Thus, we made the painful decision to let her go instead of putting her through months of suffering with an uncertain outcome and only a small chance of her having any quality of life in the future.

WIRTW #689: the “134” edition

134. That's how many different available positions Costco offered to Monica Barnett over a nearly nine-month period in an effort to accommodate her knee and wrist injuries.

0. That's how many of the offered positions Monica Barnett applied for or requested placement.

1. That's the number of paragraphs it took the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to affirm the dismissal of Barnett's failure to reasonably accommodate claim. In the Court's words:

Barnett claims Costco refused to engage in good faith, "forced" her to remain on medical leave, and required her to be "100% healed" before returning to work. These assertions are unsupported by the record. The undisputed record demonstrates that Costco held three job assessment meetings, sent Barnett 134 available positions over more than eight months, and placed Barnett in an optical-assistant position that accommodated her limitations.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try as an employer to do right by an employee, the employee is going to sue. In those cases, all you hope is that you have your i's dotted and t's crossed, all of your contemporaneously made documentation is in order, and a judge or jury will see the case for what it is and find in your favor.

Employees shouldn’t have to choose between their religion and their job

Is there any legitimate reason a concierge must be clean shaven as a condition of employment? That question is at the center of a new lawsuit the EEOC filed against Blackwell Security Services.

The EEOC alleges that a Blackwell supervisor told a Muslim hiree that it was company policy that all employees be clean shaven. When the employee requested an exemption from the policy to accommodate his religious practice, Blackwell told him to shave his beard or be terminated. To avoid losing his job, the employee complied and shaved his beard. The EEOC charge and its lawsuit followed.