In the past week, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has brought two lawsuits against employers that allegedly violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by discriminating against transgender employees.
I’ve read this post and this post about this recent lawsuit about seven current and former employees who claim they were forced to work with ‘Nazi sympathizers.’ They allege that the company hired and promoted a white employee with a swastika tattoo on his face and ties to a white nationalist group.
If true — and remember that these are just allegations in a complaint — that’s awful.
But let’s change the facts. Continue reading
Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission filed a notice of appeal with the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida, signifying that it will ask the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a trial judge’s August 15 decision to enjoin enforcement of its sweeping noncompete ban.
Should this concern employers? I’ll give you three reasons why it shouldn’t.
Last week, we discussed an FMLA policy that your business needs to rip from its employee handbook and burn with fire. This week, we revisit an Americans Disabilities Act policy that should end up on the paper shredder: the 100% healed policy.
Folks, I’ve lost track of the number of disability accommodation requests on which I’ve counseled human resources concerning employee requests to work full-time from home. So, when I came across a recent decision from the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit involving a failure-to-accommodate claim where the employer insisted on a 100% telework accommodation, I read with interest, as we lawyers like to say.
André Koehne, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Early in my career, I learned that it’s bad form for a lawyer to accuse another party of having “lied.” Judges generally frown upon this.
So, you can imagine that my interest was piqued when I read an Eighth Circuit decision issued yesterday weighing “the appropriate sanction for a plaintiff who lied in a deposition and withheld information.”
Employers that maintain a policy of treating any employee unable to return to work following the expiration of FMLA leave as having voluntarily resigned are begging for trouble.
But don’t just take my word for it. Continue reading
Emphasizing that the Department of Labor has used a minimum salary requirement to help decide who is overtime-eligible, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently determined that the Fair Labor Standards Act authorizes this benchmark. Continue reading
The Federal Trade Commission, the architects of the sweeping noncompete ban that a federal judge in Texas set aside last month, told a federal judge in Pennsylvania yesterday that an appeal of the Texas decision “would likely take months to fully brief and could take a year or longer until a final decision.” Continue reading
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