The Employment Brief | Employment Law | Kollman & Saucier, P.A.

Hooters Rails Against Award in Arbitration It Required

Darrell VanDeusen

04/04/2015

Employers without a union sometimes think it’s a good idea to consider implementing a policy that requires employees to arbitrate workplace claims rather than permit them to pursue remedies in court. The selling point, the story goes, is that it’s cheaper, faster and you don’t have to worry about a jury deciding the fate of the parties. Anyone who has gone through the arbitration process knows that along with the positives of arbitration –...

Kollman & Saucier

04/03/2015

Employment Discrimination, Pregnancy Discrimination

Tiana LaSalle is a van driver for the New York City morgue. LaSalle sued her employer alleging a variety of discrimination claims. Her chief complaint, however, appeared to be that the City refused her request for an accommodation with regard to lifting heavy objects during her pregnancy. In November 2011 Plaintiff was pregnant, and she provided her boss with a doctor's note informing him of the pregnancy. In December 2011, LaSalle told her...

Kollman & Saucier

04/01/2015

Gender Identity, Sex Discrimination

On March 30, 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a complaint alleging that Southern Oklahoma State University (“University”) subjected Dr. Rachel Tudor, a professor who is transgender, to unlawful sex discrimination in violation of Title VII. The University denies the allegations. Dr. Tudor is a male-to-female transgender professor who worked as a tenure track Assistant Professor in the University’s English Department beginning in...

Kollman & Saucier

03/26/2015

Wage & Hour

Suppose that you are an employer who has been found to have violated the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). In an attempt to curb future liability, you calculate the overtime owed to your employees who were mistakenly misclassified as exempt and print checks informing the employees that the amount of those checks represents “full payment . . . [for] wages earned, including minimum wage and overtime, up to the date of the check.” Can employees then...

Kollman & Saucier

03/26/2015

Employment Discrimination, Pregnancy Discrimination

On March 26, 2015, the Supreme Court announced its decision in Young v. UPS, setting forth a new standard for how employees may prove a claim of pregnancy discrimination under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA). Young v. United Parcel Service, Inc., 575 U.S. ____ (2015). In Young, the Court faced the issue of how to interpret the second clause of the PDA, which states: women affected by pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions...

Kollman & Saucier

03/20/2015

Employment Discrimination

It’s a victory for Fourth Circuit employers (Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia) as the court clarifies that a complaint alleging employment discrimination must contain facts in support of each element of a claim in order to survive a motion to dismiss. McCleary-Evans v. Maryland Dept. of Transportation, No. 13-2488 (4th Cir. March 13, 2015). In this case, McCleary-Evans, an African-American woman, applied for two...

Kollman & Saucier

03/18/2015

Disability & Leave, Employment Discrimination

Can an employer lawfully fire a customer service employee whose social anxiety precludes her from interacting with customers? Not before exploring whether it can offer the employee a reasonable accommodation to perform her job duties, explained the Fourth Circuit in last week’s decision: Jacobs v. N.C. Administrative Office of the Courts, No. 13-2212 (4th Cir. Mar. 12, 2015). In this case, Christina Jacobs, who suffered from social anxiety...

Kollman & Saucier

03/13/2015

Workplace Productivity

March 16 marks the beginning of the end of the NCAA college basketball season. A global outplacement firm did some number crunching and concluded that March Madness could cost employers as much as $1.9 billion (yes billion) in productivity. Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., the firm conducting this study, based its calculations on the number of workers likely to be caught up in madness; the estimated time spent considering and completing...

Kollman & Saucier

03/11/2015

Agency Activity, Supreme Court Decisions, Wage & Hour

The Supreme Court has confirmed that federal agencies, including the Department of Labor (DOL), are exempted from the Administrative Procedure Act's formal notice-and-comment rulemaking requirements when changing interpretative rules, as explained in its unanimous decision Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Ass'n, No. 13-1041, (U.S. March 9, 2015). With this decision, the Supreme Court overruled the long established doctrine from Paralyzed Veterans of...

Kollman & Saucier

03/05/2015

Agency Activity, FMLA, Same-Sex Marriage

On February 25, 2015, the Department of Labor issued a Final Rule changing the definition of “spouse” under the Family and Medical Leave Act. The Final Rule impacts those individuals who entered into legal same-sex marriages in a state that recognizes same-sex marriage, but now reside in a state that does not. The prior iteration of the Rule defined “spouse” (29 CFR §§ 825.102 and 825.122(b)) based on the residency of the eligible...

< 1 … 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 … 128 >

Email Updates

Hooters Rails Against Award in Arbitration It Required

Court Rules Morgue Worker Injured While Transporting Cadaver Can Proceed With Pregnancy Discrimination Claim.

Transgender Discrimination? He Said, She Said...

More on the Dangers of Unsupervised FLSA Settlements

Supreme Court Clarifies Pregnancy Discrimination Act Claims in Young v. UPS

Merely Alleging Decision-Maker Bias Insufficient to State a Title VII Claim

Customer Rep With Social Anxiety Can Proceed to Trial on Disability Claims

March Madness: Happy, Unproductive Employees?

Supreme Court Okays DOL's FLSA Interpretative Rule Change

Department of Labor Issues Revision To Definition of Spouse Under FMLA

Email Updates