“It’s 2019. All of our employees have been on Facebook for years. Many are also on Twitter, and Instagram, and … We don’t need to do any social media training.”
If you’ve had these thoughts or internal conversations, allow me to offer Exhibit 1 as to why you are wrong.
Texas district votes to fire teacher who tried to report
If the U.S. Supreme Court decided an employment case, I’m contractually obligated to blog about it. Yet, Ford Bend County, Texas v. Davis, which it decided earlier this week, is of little practical import.
To file a private employment discrimination lawsuit under one of the federal employment discrimination statutes, a plaintiff must first exhaust his or her remedies by filing a charge of discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
What happens, however, if the employee skips over the EEOC and proceeds straight to court? Does that court even have jurisdiction over the claim, or is the omitted EEOC filing merely an affirmative defense for an employer to raise in seeking dismissal of the lawsuit?
With a couple of important exceptions, an employer can require that employees be up to date on their vaccinations.
The exceptions?
1/ An employee with an ADA disability that prevents him or her from receiving a vaccine may be entitled to an exemption from a mandatory vaccination requirement as a reasonable accommodation.
2/ An employee with a sincerely held religious belief, practice, or observance that prevents him or her from receiving a vaccine may also be entitled to an exemption from a mandatory vaccination requirement as a reasonable accommodation.
A bank fires two female employees for violating its vault-access policy. They claim sex discrimination, pointing their fingers squarely at three male employees who they say violated the same policy, but only received performance counseling.
No law causes employers more compliance headaches than the Fair Labor Standards Act. On its face it’s simple—pay employees no less than a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour (or more, depending on your state or locality), and non-exempt employees an overtime premium of 1.5 times their regular rate of pay for any hours worked in excess of 40 in any work week.
Simple on its face, yet extraordinarily complicated in application. This law costs employers billions of dollars per year in non-compliance.
An employee complaints to HR that her supervisor has been sexually harassing her. The allegations aren’t pretty, and, if the investigation is mishandled (or even if it’s handled perfectly), you are reasonably confident that the employee will sue the company. Thus, you want to ensure that every “i” is dotted and “t” crossed in the investigation. So, you bring in the big guns to handle the investigation—the company’s attorney.
At the conclusion of the investigation, the lawyer recommends that the company suspend, and not fire the harasser. That decision leads to the victim filing suit.
During her lawsuit, the employee requests a copy of the investigatory report. You refuse, claiming it’s protected by the attorney-client privilege.
Earlier this year, the Senate took up the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. It would, among other things, prohibit employers from requiring employees, as a condition of employment, to sign agreements submitting employment and civil rights claims to arbitration in lieu of filing in court. According to Vox.com, this legislation has some initial bipartisan support, and has some legit traction to perhaps become law.
I am on record as not being a fan of arbitration for employment disputes. I do not believe they are any less expensive or time consuming that in-court litigation. In stead, I've previously argued for tools such as contractually shortened statutes of limitations and jury waivers as tools employers can to limit risk instead of arbitration agreements.
How do we raise our girls to become confident women? It’s a question I think about a lot as a dad to an almost teenage girl.
🙋♀️ We encourage them to pursue their passions.
🙋♀️ We get them working collaboratively with other girls.
🙋♀️ We put them into positions to gain leadership skills.
🙋♀️ We praise their successes.
While I love School of Rock for both of my kids, this is why I especially love it for my daughter.
To see an almost 13-year-old (everyone wish Norah a Happy Birth Day for Monday) command a stage with skill and passion, and with the love, respect, and admiration of her peers, older and younger, fills this dad with a ton of pride and joy.
And it tells me that she’ll be just fine as an adult, whether her journey is through music or otherwise.
So enjoy Norah doing her thing last weekend (along with Donovan’s fly dance moves), taking the lead on Triumph by the Screaming Females.
As for Norah’s own band, Fake ID, you have two chances to see them live over the next few weeks.
June 1 @ Ohio Bike Week, in Sandusky. They’ll be on the Scott Gast Memorial Stage, at Columbus Ave. and Water St., from 3:30 - 5 pm.
June 15 @ Crocker Park, in Westlake. They’ll be rocking the square in front of Regal Cinemas from 5:30 - 7 pm.
Both shows are open to the public and free. Keep an eye out for the merch table to grab your official Fake ID t-shirt.
Assuming Stan’s correct, and more people are becoming more comfortable openly using this generally considered highly offensive and taboo word, how should you react if your employees start using it among each other? Swiftly and decisively, that’s how.
I
worked for a grocery store. Can a child molester be
employed by the grocery store? I reported it to the manager, and showed proof and nothing was done about it.
There’s a lot going on here. What does the law require an employer to do (if anything) under these circumstances? And what should an employer do when it discovers it is employing a sex offender?
So background, I have IBS and sometimes have to go the bathroom multiple times per work day. My supervisor doesn’t believe I am legitimately using the bathroom, so he said today at the end of the day today if I don’t send him a picture or otherwise prove that I used the bathroom, I will lose 15 minutes of paid time. What sort of recourse do I have?
“We want 669 in life. What is 669? Six times in six days; the emphasis is on nine,” he said at a company gathering, referring to sex, and using a play on words, as the word “nine” in Mandarin is a homophone for the word “long.”
He wants his employees to have long sex six times every six days.
Thanks to, among other states, Alabama, Georgia, and Ohio (sorry about that last one), the debate over abortion is raging. Suppose you are staunchly anti-abortion, and you learn that one of your employees is considering, or has had, an abortion. Can you fire her?
Thus far, three courts have looked at this issue, and all three courts have all reached the same conclusion.
A recent op-ed in the USAToday argues that the federal government should outlaw noncompete agreements because they trap workers in abusive workplaces.
Since women who complain about harassment face retaliation and even termination, often the only way to escape it is to find a new job. Yet for many women, continuing their careers with a new employer turns out to be impossible.
That is because of noncomplete clauses. After they have resigned or even been fired, workers bound by noncompetes cannot accept employment in the same line of work or industry as their former employer for a specified period in a certain city, state or even the entire country. Nearly 30 million working people, including more than 12 million women, are locked into their jobs because of noncompete clauses.…
By depriving them of outside employment opportunities, noncompetes lock victims of harassment into abusive environments.
I could not disagree more. Noncompete clauses are not responsible for trapping sexual harassment victims in abusive workplaces.
Laws protecting whistle-blowers from retaliation have a long and storied history in the annals of American law. Indeed, according to The Personal Toll of Whistleblowing, recently published in The New Yorker*, these laws date back 241 years to the American Revolution and the Second Continental Congress:
The first documented whistle-blowing case in the United States took place in 1777, not long after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, when a group of naval officers, including Samuel Shaw and Richard Marven, witnessed their commanding officer torturing British prisoners of war. When they reported the misconduct to Congress, the commanding officer charged Shaw and Marven with libel, and both men were jailed. The following year, Congress passed a law protecting whistle-blowers, and Shaw and Marven were acquitted by a jury.
