According to a recent Vanity Fair article, Zenefits, the company providing cloud-based HR administration systems, circulated a memo to its workforce advising employees that it was against company policy to have sex in the stairwells at work. The memo “warned staff that smoking, drinking, and having sex was inappropriate office behavior after security
AT&T Warning Employees to Update Skills or Become Obsolete?
The New York Times profiled AT&T’s corporate education program where the company offers to pay for all or part of the classes employees take to help modernize their skills. The program has been in place for approximately two years and the purpose of the program, according to the article, is to “retrain its 280,000 employees
EEOC Announces New Procedures for Disclosing Employer Position Statements to Plaintiff Attorneys
Last week the EEOC announced that it had issued new practices for transmitting employer position statements to charging parties and their attorneys. Historically, most Commission field offices did not provide copies of the actual position statements to the charging parties during the course of the investigation. Rather, investigators typically retyped or summarized relevant positions of
Halliburton Agrees to $18M Overtime Settlement with DOL
The DOL announced a wage and hour settlement with Halliburton where Halliburton agrees to pay over $18,000,000 to over 1,000 workers. This settlement emphasizes two important points for me. First, it exemplifies the difficulty even large, publically traded companies can have in determining whether an employee meets one of the white collar exemptions. The announced
NFL’s “Deflategate”: A Caveat for Employers
Today, I turn the keyboard over to my colleague Victor Jones for a special guest post. Victor practices in Kelly Hart’s New Orleans’s office. He has some thoughts on what employers might learn from the fallout over Tom Brady’s failure to preserve the cell phone he used during and immediately after last year’s AFC Championship
New Overtime Rules to be Proposed as Early as This Week
President Obama has announced that a soon to be released proposed rule from the U.S. Department of Labor will include an increase in the minimum salary necessary for an employee to qualify as an exempt employee. Under the proposal announced by @POTUS today, by 2016, employers will have to pay exempt employees a minimum or
Congress Should Provide Employers with Immunity to Identify and Correct Wage and Hour Mistakes
One of the many problems with the Fair Labor Standards Act (the federal law that requires most employee be paid at least a minimum wage and overtime) is that it provides little incentive for employers that discover honest wage and hour mistakes such as a misclassification or a failure to correctly calculate overtime to fix
Proper Planning Now Can Lead to Complaint-Free Company Holiday Party
I’m sitting here trying to come up with an idea for this year’s family holiday card. Last year’s theme was “Silent Night”. But while I think about what I need to be doing to prepare for the holidays, I’m reminded that many employers are also planning their company end-of-year parties. So, from the archieves are
Light Duty Policies Limited to On-the-Job Injuries Going the Way of the Dinosaur
As I wrote several months ago, light duty programs limiting participation to employees recovering from on-the-job injuries are being increasingly scrutinized by the EEOC (See post here) and that we have likely seen the end of those polices. The Washington Post reports today that UPS, despite having a case pending before the U.S. Supreme
Texas Employee Awarded $11.6M by Austin Jury in Defamation Case
It’s a rare day in Texas where a single-plaintiff employment case results in a seven or eight figure jury verdict. However, as the Austin Business Journal recently reported,Microsoft was hit with an $11.6M jury verdict in a defamation case filed by a former employee falsely accused of sexually harassing a Microsoft contractor.
Defamation cases