The Employer Handbook Blog

In the aftermath of yesterday’s tragic events, President Obama remarked, “Boston is a tough and resilient town. So are its people.” If you want to help them, here and here are some ways to do it.

This blog is nearly 2 1/2 years old and we have our first Equal Pay Act post. The Equal Pay Act requires equal pay for equal work on jobs the performance of which require equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and which are performed under similar working conditions. Any wage discrimination on…

Yesterday, CareerBuilder.com released its list of 15 of the most unusual things that bosses have asked employees to do. I’ve had a lot of rough, odd jobs in my lifetime — *** Hey silver spoon! Quit giving me the stink eye over there. If I write it, my readers believe…

  From the blog that brought you the classy September 2011 post, “This old mother****** may just have an age discrimination claim,” comes a story of a woman whom her former employer **cough** affectionately **cough** referred to as “Old Rose.” On other occasions, the plaintiff Rosemary Marsh was told, “you’re…

To defend against a claim of discrimination, an employer can argue that it fired an employee because it honestly believed that the employee did “X.” And, as long as “X” isn’t discriminatory, the employer prevails. This is the honest belief doctrine. So, can an employee flip the “honest belief doctrine”…

You run a delivery service using large trucks and require that drivers be qualified by the Department of Transportation. Although your facility managers aren’t often behind the wheel of the big rigs, you nonetheless require that they too be DOT certified. One day, a manager with a disabling eye injury…

Many states and localities have laws forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (LGBT). But Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, one of the federal laws barring discrimination in the workplace, law does not prohibit it. What Title VII does make unlawful, however, is stereotyping based on a…

After yesterday’s super-serious Animal House post — Toga! Toga! Toga! — let’s lighten things up a bit with a list of the most memorable tardiness excuses employers shared in a recent CareerBuilder Annual Survey. Employee dropped her purse into a coin-operated newspaper box and couldn’t retrieve it without change (which…

– “Mr. Dorfman?” – “Hello!” – “0.2… Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.” * * * – “That’s Left Ear. Demolition and explosives. When he was ten, he put one too many M-80s in the toilet bowl. Lost the hearing in his right ear.…

While some people; namely, hockey players with local ties, use Twitter to congratulate an ex-wife on end of divorce payments, others spew venom about their bosses. I know. I should have warned you to sit down first. Let me know when the shock subsides. K-thx. And the latest 15-minutes-of-fame, there’s-an-app-for-that, spotlight…