Employment Law Blog Carnival: The Back-to-School Edition

Welcome everyone to the latest edition of the Employment Law Blog Carnival. What Target and Wal-Mart are to back-to-school shopping, this is your one-stop-shop for the hottest trends in employment law.

Your original carnival hosts for this month, my good pal Ari Rosenstein and the great folks at CPEhr.com asked me to step in. So, consider me the hot substitute teacher. [Hey! Eyes up here!] Glad to help out my friends.

Credit to Ari and the team for all of the hard work in putting this month’s edition of the Employment Law Blog Carnival together. I’ll take credit for all of the grammar errors, typos, and the inappropriate carnival soundtrack (you’ll see…).

Click through and enjoy!

* * *

With August slowly drawing to an end, the incessant ads for fall clothing, lunch boxes and school supplies can only mean one thing – it’s time to head back to school! So in honor of all our students who have enjoyed a (far too long) summer break – and the parents who tolerated them – we dedicate this month’s Blog Carnival to you!

You can be sure, on the first day of school, the lunch boxes will be meticulously planned and packed. While our kids may not have the luxury of working and eating at home, Michael Haberman tackles this common employment situation in Lunchtime and the Telecommuting Employee.

Unfortunately, drug abuse is far too common in today’s high schools. While random drug testing is being proposed in some schools, it is not a simple matter (read here and here). Donna Ballman discusses random drug testing in the workplace, along with other topics on her blog, Screw You Guys, I’m Going Home. And yours truly shares his script idea for the lost episode of Breaking Bad (the one where Jesse brings an ADA lawsuit)

In the school yard, it is inevitable you will come up against the ‘school yard bully’. He will pick on one kid after the next, until he gets what he wants. Mitchell W. Quick discusses the employment-yard bully in his post, Maybe the 37th Time is the Charm.

With the explosion of smart phones over the past few years, there isn’t a kid at school without an iPhone or Android (whoops, did I forget to mention Blackberry?). And with such a proliferation of pocket-sized technology, young adults now video and record every step they take. While schools may not have yet passed laws on the usage of anti-school videos via social media channels, Jon Hyman weighs in on the NLRB’s position towards the impact of videos in the workplace and Vanessa Goddard asks, Will Vine Entangle Your Workplace? And Jesse Dill reminds employers to educate their employees on social media etiquette.

Since school’s just starting, we don’t want to discuss potential misbehavior, suspensions or expulsions. So we won’t. But in the world of employment, terminations are inevitable. Stuart Rudner notes that “The times – and notice periods – they are a-changin’” in his post about termination notification. And Janette Levey Frisch weighs in on the questions you should never ask during an employee interview.

It would be fair to say that the vast majority of US-based students attend a school somewhere near their hometown. If a conflict arose between the students, parents, or school body, the issue would most certainly be resolved locally. But what would happen if a foreign student experienced trouble? Robert B. Fitzpatrick discusses the Alien Tort Statute and the implication of a foreign citizens filing a lawsuit in the US.

And who among us hasn’t had a schoolgirl/schoolboy crush? Ain’t it romantic. It doesn’t really work that way in the workplace. There, writes Adam P. Whitney, it’s known as sexual harassment.

Alright, I’m going to recess. For the rest of what’s hot in employment law, we’ve got Lorene Schafer with a Workplace Mediations: Q&A with Plaintiff’s Attorney Donna Ballman, Phil Miles has the latest on an ERISA Decision Post-Supreme Court DOMA Decision, Heath Bussing explains why best practices suck, John Holmquist has the lowdown on what to expect from the newly reconstituted NLRB, Crystal Spraggins has you covered on shady hiring practices, and Randy Enochs dishes on a recent 7th Circuit employment-law decision.

As evidenced by the foregoing run-on sentence, I desperately need a grammar lesson.

Class dismissed…until next month, when Heather Bussing and HRExaminer.com will host the next edition of the Employment Law Blog Carnival on September 18.

 

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Credit for nostalgic 80’s rock before Sammy Hagar screwed up an otherwise great band: Me