Management’s Workplace Blog – Information and Insights for Employers
“Too many hens in the hen house.” Quaint remark, isn’t it? The problem is, these quaint remarks can end up as evidence of discrimination, as one employer learned to its sorrow in Ford v. E.J. Leizerman & Associates, LLC.
In that case, an older female attorney sued her law firm for age and sex …
Teenagers! In the world of social media, they seem to have no sense of privacy. They will share anything and everything with their multitude of Facebook “friends.” And in one case, doing that cost the teenager’s father $80,000 for breach of the confidentiality provision in his settlement agreement.
I follow proposed employment legislation in Maryland during our legislative session, which runs from January to April each year. More and more, the bills that are proposed use California statutes as models, which is troubling. Employers in our State certainly do not want Maryland to become the “California of the East!” More troubling still, in …
One of the most challenging issues that my clients deal with is managing employee leave rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act. Getting employees to come to work on a regular basis can be frustrating – hair-pulling, teeth-gnashing frustrating. So the recent case of Mecca v. Florida Health …
Even smart people can get tripped up on personnel decisions. Harvard, for example, ran into this problem in Pierce v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.
That case involves an African-American university police officer claiming race discrimination and retaliation in the denial of three promotions and being placed on foot duty. The court threw…
In a happier, pre-ADAAA (Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act) time, I could blithely advise clients that any medical condition that lasted less that 6 months was only temporary, and therefore was not a covered disability under the ADA. Upon passage of the ADAAA, however, this elegantly simple, bright-line rule no longer applies. Instead, we …
This seems like a no-brainer – if an employee has to work fewer hours, the employer should expect (and assign) less work from the employee. Well, an employer you would think would be savvy about this obvious point – IBM – seems to have missed it, in the case of Hochstetler v. International Business Machines, …
We’ve heard about racial profiling by the police. But what about by employers? A state agency, the Nebraska Equal Opportunity Commission, made the very broad (and aggressive) finding that, “Racial profiling occurs when an employee . . . is questioned, disciplined, and terminated, on the basis of his race.” That is a strange definition of…
It seemed obvious to me, and I imagine most employers would agree, that if an employee refused to participate in a police investigation into workplace theft, you could terminate that employee. Well, we all might be wrong (??!!), according to a federal district court, in the case of Gomez v. Garda CL Great Lakes, Inc…
Most (I hope) employers understand that they have to comply with the notice and authorization requirements of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) when using a third party to conduct background checks of current and prospective employees. What many employers don’t realize is that there are certain FCRA obligations that may apply with regard to …
