While recognizing the prevalence of automated systems, including those sometimes marketed as “artificial intelligence” or “AI,” and the “insights and breakthroughs, increasing efficiencies and cost-savings” that AI can offer, four federal agencies recently announced in a joint statement that they are ready to police “unlawful bias,” “unlawful discrimination,” and “other…
For me, yesterday was all about the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In the morning and for most of the afternoon, I served as a volunteer EEOC mediator to help resolve a Charge of Discrimination. After completing my service, I chilled out with a copy of the EEOC’s new technical…
The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to pay covered nonexempt workers overtime pay at a rate not less than one and one-half times the regular rate of pay after 40 hours of work in a workweek. So what happens when employees claim not to receive premium overtime pay despite…
MicroZesTo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons If you’re asking that question to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the answer is no. At the end of last week, the EEOC announced that it had sued two companies allegedly violating federal law when they failed to prevent and correct ongoing…
You develop policies and train everyone — especially your managers — on how to handle situations like the example I have for you today. This lawsuit involves a plaintiff who filed a complaint — remember, these are just allegations — stating that she routinely interacted with a coworker with female…
Yesterday, on the same day that some of the Supreme Court noted that Congress hadn’t changed Title VII’s undue hardship standard for religious accommodations, the House and Senate reintroduced the Do No Harm Act, which the bill sponsors claim will “address the increasing use of religious freedom as a justification…
Employment lawyers and HR professionals generally preach that employees view “it’s not a good fit” to explain their termination of employment as code for discrimination or retaliation. It’s HR101. But yesterday, a federal court of appeals explained that this well-intentioned but often misconstrued rationale isn’t always a thinly-veiled, pretextual excuse…
Many courts are generally reluctant to enforce noncompetes. And sometimes employers make their tasks even easier. For example, I read a state appellate court decision last night in which a company tried to enforce a three-year, thirty-mile noncompete against its former nurse practitioner that would prevent her from “provide[ing]…
So when the plaintiff in this federal court decision I read last night cited as evidence of her employer’s heterosexual animus that her gay coworker received a cake and party by gay supervisors on his 30th work anniversary, whereas she did not receive cake or party for the same occasion,…
Last night, I read a federal appellate court decision in which an employee with back spasms, sciatica, fibromyalgia, and pinched nerves claimed that her employer didn’t give her the help she needed to do her job. The plaintiff requested a “standing footrest” and “ergonomic chair” as reasonable accommodations. But she…