Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
In response to the published results of a recent survey of low-wage workers in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis announced that the Department of Labor (DOL) will be putting at least 250 more wage and hour inspectors on the ground to audit employer compensation practices. In other words, […]
The U.S. Supreme Court has just handed employers one more reason to keep quiet when asked to give a job reference for a former employee. Charles Robinson sued Shell Oil Co. for race discrimination after he was fired. Later, when Shell gave him a negative reference, he filed a second lawsuit charging that the bad […]
By BLR Founder and CEO Bob Brady BLR CEO Bob Brady is on vacation this week, so we’re offering one of his most popular columns that deals with a problem that most all HR managers face—negativity. A reader recently wrote to ask how to deal with “negativity,” specifically, employees who can see only the dark […]
Life is full of decisions. Think for a moment about all the decisions you face at work in just a single day. You make many choices every day that affect your business. Depending on your exact role, you make decisions about people, projects, strategy, and more. A lot of choices.
A noted consultant suggests that retention starts with the right hire, and builds by adding feedback, care and trust. But what does the right hire start with? Yesterday’s Daily Advisor began a discussion of the issue of retention, a topic that, by all measures of our readers, is one of your prime concerns. One business […]
Latino employees at an Arizona community college were understandably offended when a professor broadly distributed e-mail messages exalting the “superiority of Western Civilization” and deriding the contributions of nonwhite immigrants and Native Americans. But did the professor’s messages create a racially hostile work environment? The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers Alaska, Arizona, […]
Religious employers are protected from discrimination claims made by their own ministers, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously Jan. 11. In its first ruling addressing the ministerial exception that is often read into the U.S. Constitution, the Court determined that “there is such a ministerial exception,” and that it bars ministers from bringing employment discrimination […]
Suppose an employee’s medical condition prevents them from performing their job. Instead of exploring whether a reasonable accommodation is available, you terminate the employee. And, not surprisingly, you wind up with a disability-bias lawsuit on your hands. But what if it turns out the employee wasn’t disabled in the first place? Can you still be […]
Employers will not have any reason to adjust their qualified transportation fringe benefit plans — not as a result of a major highway funding bill that recently became law, anyway. That bill, known as the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century, or MAP-21, once had a transit benefit parity provision in it, which […]
President Barack Obama has signed an executive order raising the minimum wage federal contractors must pay to $10.10 an hour. The White House released a fact sheet ahead of the January 28 State of the Union speech saying Obama would use his executive authority to raise the minimum wage for those working on new federal […]