Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
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, […]
When all it takes is a few keystrokes to apply for a job, recruiters often find themselves in a quandary: A “successful” posting has attracted a candidate pool that is vastly larger than what was expected. Dealing with hundreds or thousands of resumes—many of which are from woefully unqualified applicants—is overwhelming. Recruiters, and especially high-volume […]
BusinessWeek ranks business books that are the most recent bestsellers and provides a short summary. 1. StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup’s Now, Discover Your Strengths by Tom Rath. Are you unsure where your true talents lie? Do you feel that you are both a person who gets […]
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 […]
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 […]
In yesterday’s Advisor, we offered Michael P. Aitken’s suggestions for employers reeling from the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Today, more of Aitken’s tips, and an introduction to an extraordinary policy development program. Aitken’s advice came during the Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) recent annual Conference and Exposition in […]
Statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor estimate that almost 70% of employers aren’t in compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)—a percentage that almost certainly increases when similar violations under state law are taken into account. The federal Department of Labor is tackling this problem in a big way, dedicating a staggering $25 […]
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 […]
If you can avoid medical problems through preventive medicine, can you do the same for legal problems? There’s a whole community of lawyers who think so. These days, businesses are spending millions of dollars on wellness initiatives, in an effort to cut healthcare costs by stopping medical troubles before they happen. Another term for this […]