Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
By BLR Founder and CEO Bob Brady Your plate is probably overly full with downsizing, trying to make ends meet, and trying to keep your budget projections at least somewhat in line with reality. The last thing you need to be dealing with is a lawsuit brought by a disgruntled employee or former employee. But […]
Tonight we revisited the episode “Heavy Competition,” which is rife with the kind of employee misconduct that keeps us lawyers busy. Last time we looked at this episode, we talked about trade-secret violations as well as Dwight Schrute’s personal liability for his bizarre antics, which included placing a dead fish in an air-conditioning vent in […]
The U.S. Senate confirmed Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court today in a 68-31 vote. As expected, the Senators voted along party lines, with all Senate Democrats and only nine Republicans voting to confirm President Barack Obama’s nominee. The final step in Sotomayor’s road to the Supreme Court will be a White House […]
Things are getting really busy, and now employee A wants FMLA leave, B has jury duty, and C needs an accommodation. It can be frustrating, but employees have rights, and it’s foolhardy to challenge them. In yesterdays’ Advisor we began covering 10 essential steps for avoiding employee lawsuits. Here are steps 5 through 10: Step […]
Senators Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), and Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) introduced the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) today in the U.S. Senate. ENDA was previously introduced on June 24 in the U.S. House of Representatives. If passed, ENDA would prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. According […]
Maybe—but it depends on how your paid time off benefits are structured. In California, there are two types of paid time off: time that “vests” and is considered to be part of an employee’s wages, and time that does not vest.
If an employee mentions feeling harassed, bullied, or discriminated against, but is concerned about retaliation, is the employer required to get the complaining employee’s permission before starting an investigation into the problem?
As workplaces become more technology-dependent, more and more companies are hiring information technology (IT) employees to work in-house.
In almost every case, when you investigate the underlying cause of an employee lawsuit, you’ll find that the manager or supervisor either caused it or could have prevented it. Managers and supervisors cause lawsuits simply by: Saying the wrong thing or asking the wrong questions Treating employees unfairly Humiliating, harassing, or retaliating, or Doing nothing […]
By Derek Knoechel As the authors of the July 13, 2009, Northern Exposure article “Canadian Employers May Be Obligated to Provide References” indicate, a positive reference letter can be worth its weight in gold to an employee who has been fired. But employers often don’t want to provide reference letters, and a reference letter can […]