Two black employees complain to a supervisor that a white co-worker is taunting them with racial pejoratives. What do you do? Take the complaint seriously, investigate, and take other steps that are reasonably designed to end the complained-of behavior, nothing, or ignore the complaint, just like the racist graffiti of…
Nick Step / CC BY Earlier this week, ViacomCBS announced that it had severed ties with Nick Cannon over anti-Semitic remarks he made recently on this episode of his YouTube podcast “Cannon’s Class.” Mr. Cannon has often appeared on cable networks, MTV and TeenNick, both of which ViacomCBS owns. In…
Image by Mr Salih from Pixabay Yesterday’s post about employees wearing Black Lives Matter apparel at work was a bit of a lightning rod. While all of the comments I received were respectful — thank you! — some questioned whether allowing employees to wear BLM face masks, pins, and insignia…
The All-Nite Images from NY, NY, USA / CC BY-SA If you’ve read the news recently, you may have seen stories like this one and this one about large businesses that had policies against employees wearing pro-BLM clothes and apparel. In those two examples, each of the companies has since changed…
Image by John Hain from Pixabay To be quite honest with you, I’m somewhat bewildered. It’s not that I don’t have an opinion on George Floyd’s death, the related protests and riots, and other similar events of the past week. But, between social media and just plain socializing, I find…
Image Credit: Wokandapix (pixabay.com) Do you ever wonder what the heck is wrong with people sometimes? Of course, you do; you’re in human resources. For example… Over the weekend, a story started making the rounds online about a college recruiter in the midwest who went to a charter school in…
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay Technically, they settled for $1.15M. But, that won’t stop me from playing some ‘Lil Wayne. Many of you have good taste in employment law blogs, my ramblings and typos notwithstanding. That’s because you also read Jon Hyman’s Ohio Employer Law Blog. Jon’s blog is a…
Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay Let’s cue the music. Double trouble. In May 2019, a man from Michigan sued his employer in federal court alleging that the company had created a hostile work environment based on race by discriminating against and harassing customers and allowing customers to harass non-white…
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay It’s bad enough when a federal judge refers to a plaintiff-employee’s behavior towards her manager as “harassing, stalking, disturbing, and menacing.” And, I apologize that I didn’t have enough room in the title of this blog post to mention the plaintiff’s profanity and fighting at…
Image Credit: PeakPX.com – License to use Creative Commons Zero – CC0 Every so often, I receive a Google Alert about some knucklehead who writes something inappropriate — usually a racial slur — on a restaurant receipt. Often, the knucklehead tries to explain her or his actions away as a…