Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
In a divided 4-3 ruling, the California Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional state laws limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples.1 The case arose out of San Francisco’s move, back in 2004, to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples. The decision was immediately challenged, and the California Supreme Court ruled then that the marriages were […]
The U.S. Supreme Court has handed down two new rulings that give employees more leeway when suing employers for retaliation based on race and age.
Employment law attorney Michael Maslanka reviews the book Dealing with Difficult People, from the Results Driven Manager series published by Harvard Business School. Review covers three of book’s best tips for managers for dealing with employees. Ever see those business book paperbacks in airport concession stands? You know, the ones in the metal racks that […]
Job descriptions are the basis for so much of what we do in HR, yet—if we’re not careful—they can also be the basis for severe and expensive problems. Today, the accent is on the positive. Tomorrow? Well, we’ll see. Susan M. Heathfield, HR consultant and speaker, shares her five positives and three negatives of job […]
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in separate decisions that retaliation is prohibited under two federal discrimination statutes that don’t clearly say so — 42 U.S.C. § 1981 and the federal-sector provisions of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA). CBOCS West, Inc. v. Humphries In the first case, a Cracker Barrel assistant manager sued […]
by Helen Gray McCarthy Tetrault A recent decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal places new limits on a trial judge’s ability to award damages for conduct on the part of an employer during the termination process that is said to amount to “bad faith.” While it’s an Ontario decision, it can be expected to […]
By Naseem Malikand Daniel Pugen McCarthy Tetrault Let’s say you are the human resources director for a Canadian-based operation with affiliates in other countries. One of your numerous responsibilities is to manage the company’s temporary foreign workers, including Americans, in Canada. A challenge you face is handling retention issues with some foreign workers. Given their […]
The latest increase in the minimum wage happens soon, and a big change in FMLA is in effect now, so you’d better have posters reflecting the changes (which include a new FMLA “poster insert”) in a prominent place. Here’s a low cost, worry-free way to take care of it all at once. Why think about […]
(Updated Dec. 30, 2009) Q. We have an employee who works as an administrative assistant. She was recently in a car accident and injured her arm, hand, and wrist. Her main job duty is to transcribe documents. That often requires her to type for hours at a time. She also is responsible for taking handwritten […]
We thought managing PTO was going to be easy, but we’ve found some problems with carryover of PTO hours. We currently allow unlimited carryover, but that’s going to cause some problems down the road (like three-month vacations). So we’d like to limit carryover. Is there a carryover rule? We really want to force employees to […]