Tag: california hr

Supreme Court Won’t Review FLSA Whistleblower Case

The U.S. Supreme Court has announced that it will not review an appeals court ruling that a wage and hour complaint lodged by a human resources director can be “protected activity” under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) as long as he or she is not responsible for compliance with the law.

California Seeks to Close the Wage Gap

By Megan Walker, Fisher Phillips The Federal Equal Pay Act was signed into law by President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Fifty-three years later, lawmakers across the United States are still searching for ways to narrow the pay gap between men and women. California is one of the states that is leading the way—so what […]

Pension Reform for California

By Jeff Sloan and Susan Yoon, Renne Sloan Holtzman Sakai LLP In a groundbreaking decision issued in August, the California Court of Appeal shot down a constitutional challenge brought by employees and their unions against the Marin County Employees’ Retirement Association’s (MCERA) action to eliminate certain forms of “spiking” payments from being included in the […]

California Agricultural and Domestic Workers Get New Overtime Rights

By Susan Prince, JD, M.S.L., Legal Editor Agricultural and domestic workers in California have won new overtime rights under state law. BLR® Legal Editor Susan Prince, JD, MSL, has all the information our readers need to know on how these new laws differ from current legislation, what to expect in the coming years, and what […]

California Leads the Way on Paid Family Leave

It may not be a huge surprise for California HR professionals, but recent research from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) shows that employers in California are ahead of the national average when it comes to paid family leave policies. Much of this trend is driven by state and local laws.

Apple Gets Bitten by Contract Interference Lawsuit

By Cathleen S. Yonahara, Freeland Cooper & Foreman LLP One of the largest tech companies in the world, Apple, Inc., recently bit off more than it could chew when it allegedly convinced an employer to terminate an employee in retaliation for his resistance to Apple’s allegedly illegal anticompetitive conduct. Read the details of this California […]

While You Were Gone … We Found out We Didn’t Need You

What happens when an employee is out on job-protected leave and an employer realizes that everything keeps moving along just fine without him or her or that his or her duties shouldn’t really take 40 hours per week? The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California recently had to decide just that.

California Employers Must Be Proactive with Arbitration Agreements

By Carolina A. Schwalbach, Carothers DiSante & Freudenberger LLP In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court held class arbitration waivers to be enforceable, and since then, many arbitration agreements have been modified to include such waivers. Doing so has allowed employers to streamline the resolution of disputes that otherwise would be in an overburdened court system […]

California Gets an ‘A’ in FMLA Protections

A recent state-by-state analysis shows that not many states have expanded on the Family and Medical Leave Act’s (FMLA) unpaid leave protections or adopted other policies to help expecting and new parents who are employed. However, California received all ‘A’s for the state’s paid leave policy efforts.

California Court Reminds Employers to Follow Their Own Policies

By Beth Kahn and Sigalit Shoghi, Morris Polich & Purdy LLP The California Court of Appeal has sent employers a message to be vigilant in following their policies and attentive to employees who request time off for medical conditions. A recent ruling against the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) made clear that an […]