On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission delayed any potential implementation of its proposal to ban employers from imposing noncompetes on their workers by extending the public comment period. With the extension, the FTC will now accept comments on the proposed rule until April 19. The deadline was March 20.
The answer to that question (wait for it) — it depends on the state. Continue reading
Grab your pearls for clutching, and let’s get into this recent federal court decision to find out. Continue reading
If you’re 67 years old, you work in human resources, and you happen to hear those words from the company’s U.S. president, it may be time to dust off the old resume.
Or contact the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Continue reading
A client embroiled in an employment dispute with a former employee once asked me if we could force the employee into arbitration. So, I asked the client for a copy of the arbitration agreement that the individual had signed.
After an uncomfortably long pause, I went back to drafting the complaint to be filed in court. Continue reading
Last week, the National Labor Relations Board made headlines when it concluded that nondisparagement and confidentiality provisions in severance agreements that businesses give to rank-and-file employees are unlawful.
Yesterday, the Board made headlines again by releasing this Advice Memo in which it concluded that employees who engage in group discussions about issues of race that black employees face at work, including perceived implicit bias work, are protected from retaliation by employers. Continue reading
The Americans with Disabilities Act bars employers from firing someone because they have a disability. It also requires employers to provide workplace accommodations to otherwise “qualified” individuals with actual disabilities unless going so would create an undue hardship. Someone who is “qualified” can perform the job’s essential functions with or without an accommodation.
Put another way, if the employee can’t do the job with or without help, then the ADA doesn’t protect them – as one employee recently found out the hard way. Continue reading
After completing a 90-day orientation program for newly licensed nurses, a woman was denied a full-time position as a Registered Nurse (RN) at a hospital and, instead, transferred into a lower-paying position at another facility that the same employer operated.
The woman — we’ll call her “Plaintiff” as we usually do here — alleged race discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
A plaintiff asserting a Title VII claim for race discrimination must present a convincing mosaic to the factfinder that race motivated the adverse employment action — in this case, the denial of the full-time RN position.
I won’t bury the lede. Here’s the takeaway from this post. If an employer doesn’t know that an employee is pregnant, it can’t possibly discriminate against her because she is pregnant. Continue reading
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
A company operating an offshore oil rig paid one of its “tool pushers” anywhere from $963 to $1,341 per day. His paycheck, issued every two weeks, amounted to his daily rate times the number of days he had worked in the pay period. So if the employee had worked only one day, his paycheck would total (at the range’s low end) $963; but if he had worked all 14 days, his paycheck would come to $13,482. Under that compensation scheme, the company paid the employee over $200,000 annually, with no overtime compensation.
But, the employee who supervised many others and otherwise satisfied the duties tests for the executive exemption under the Fair Labor Standards Act sued for unpaid overtime because, he claimed, the company failed to guarantee him at least $455 per week in salary. Continue reading
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