Management’s Workplace Blog – Information and Insights for Employers
Employers (most of them, anyway) understand that they must protect their employees from harassment by their co-workers or supervisors. A recent case, Freeman v. Dal-Tile Corp., provides a reminder that they must also protect their employees from harassment by outsiders.
The employer, Dal-Tile, did a significant amount of business with another company, VoStone. The…
In our troubled economic times, many employers have focused on making their workforce leaner and more efficient. This frequently involves raising performance standards for employees. But it is important to do so in a thoughtful and legally defensible way.
An illustration of this point can be found in the case of Dupont v. Allina Health …
“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 …
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 …
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 dumbfounds me how creative people can be in coming up with new ways to harass others. Take, for example, the recent case of Royal v. CCC&R Tres Arboles, LLC, which involved a complaint of sexual sniffing. Yes, sniffing. Like a dog.
A female employee worked as an apartment complex leasing manager for only…
Sometimes people think it’s ok to use a racially offensive term as long as they are a member of that race. For example, many members of the predominantly Black hip-hop culture use the N-word to each other. The problem is that other Blacks find that unacceptable. And in the workplace, it can lead to liability,…
