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Pacific Bell has agreed to pay $25 million to settle charges that it didn’t credit pregnancy leave toward an employee’s service when calculating retirement benefits. As many as 10,000 women who took leave before 1979, when Congress passed the federal law banning pregnancy discrimination, may share in the settlement. The class action suit was filed […]
A white female manager who charged that she was passed over for promotion in favor of an African-American man was awarded $2.6 million in damages. Patricia Steffes worked at PepsiCo for 24 years and claimed she had a long record of positive evaluations. When she complained about not getting promoted, the company allegedly retaliated by […]
The state high court has refused to throw out a $355,200 damage award to a lesbian employee who claimed she was fired after confiding to her boss she was gay. Jan Overholtzer worked for 18 years in the West Contra Costa Unified School District print shop. She said she revealed her sexual orientation to her […]
Two lawsuits charge California employers with misclassifying workers as exempt from overtime requirements. In one case, Denny’s is accused of failing to pay overtime to 1,500 managers. The suit alleges Denny’s understaffed its restaurants, causing managers to spend more than half their time performing nonmanagerial tasks such as serving food. Denny’s says its compensation system […]
The new EEOC guidelines on liability for harassment by supervisors emphasize the importance of thoroughly and impartially investigating harassment complaints. Your inquiry should include interviews of the victim, the alleged harasser and other witnesses who might have relevant information. The goal is to find out who was involved, what happened, and when, where and how […]
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has released new guidelines interpreting and expanding on last year’s Supreme Court rulings on automatic employer liability for sexual harassment by supervisors. The new guidelines are a helpful benchmark for measuring whether your anti-harassment policies and practices make the grade.
Even if you’ve correctly classified an employee as exempt from overtime, you can jeopardize the person’s status by improperly docking their pay or otherwise treating the worker as an hourly employee. And mistakes can be costly, requiring you to pay past and future overtime. But there is a little-known special provision in federal law that […]
After selling and delivering bottled water for more than three years, Peter Ramirez quit his job and sued his employer, Yosemite Water Company, for back overtime. His lawsuit, which went all the way to the California Supreme Court, highlights how difficult it can be to determine whether or not outside sales personnel qualify as exempt […]
When a federal appeals court ruled recently that software giant Microsoft Corp. will have to pay retroactive employee benefits, including stock options, to temporary employees hired through staffing agencies, it sent a shudder through the growing number of employers who use temps in addition to regular workers. Since the court’s ruling, employees and lawmakers have […]
Although most employers are well aware that sexual harassment is a serious issue, supervisors sometimes don’t take other types of workplace harassment as seriously – even though the risks can be just as great. In one recent case, for example, United Airlines found itself on the hook for nearly $3 million in damages after a […]