Tag: employer employee relations

Unintended FMLA Retaliation?

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The Family Medical Leave Act is nothing new, and neither are the difficulties, issues and paperwork that comes with it.  Most likely, at one point or another, the FMLA has caused a problem for you and your company.  Maybe you had questions about paying an exempt employee when they take intermittent FMLA leave after using up all of their vacation and sick leave.  Or maybe you had a “difficult” employee take FMLA leave just as you were getting ready to terminate them, leading to questions about when and how to go about the termination (or maybe you just let them go and are currently looking down the barrel of a retaliation lawsuit). The FMLA forbids an employer from retaliating against[…]

Exceptions for Docking Exempt Employee Pay

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The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) can cause a lot of difficulties for employers.  Thankfully, once you have successfully determined whether each of your employees is exempt or non-exempt, you are done, right?  Unfortunately not. Under the FLSA, you cannot base the amount of money you pay your salaried employees on the number of days or hours he or she works.  In other words, you generally cannot deduct money from an exempt employee’s paycheck for time off work.  But, surprise, surprise, there are exceptions to the general rule… You are permitted to dock an exempt employee’s pay: for a week when the employee does not perform any work for a day or days that the employee is absent for reasons[…]

Smokers Need Not Apply?

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Smoking has become a very important topic for employers recently. More and more employers, particularly in the healthcare industry, are refusing to hire smokers. This is by no means a recent development, as companies like Turner Broadcasting have been refusing to hire smokers for over twenty years. However, in the last few years, with rising healthcare costs, employers are seeing a ban on hiring smokers as a way to reduce costs. It is common knowledge that smokers are one source of high costs for many employers. According to the American Lung Association, smokers cost the economy over $193 billion each year, and employers could save an estimated $3,400 per year for each employee who quits smoking. Insurance rates are significantly[…]

Classification Crackdown

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The United States Department of Labor estimates that 30% of employers are misclassifying employees as independent contractors, which results in billions of dollars in lost revenue every year. Citing a desire to minimize losses in contributions to unemployment insurance funds, protect workers’ rights and “level the playing field” for employers that abide by the law, the DOL has launched the Federal Misclassification Initiative, where they are partnering with the IRS and a number of state governments to share information. The memoranda of understanding contain an agreement to share information, in order to determine when workers are being misclassified.  The cooperative efforts will likely lead to multi-pronged scrutiny and enforcement proceedings. The initiative will ensure that a worker classified as an independent contractor[…]

Anatomy of an EEOC Charge in Texas

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When a Texas employee believes he or she has been discriminated against at work because of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information under a number of federal laws, they can file a Charge of Discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. All of the laws enforced by the EEOC, except the Equal Pay Act, require an employee to file a charge before filing a job discrimination lawsuit. The employee must bring the charge within 180 days from the day the discrimination took place, or within 300 days if a state or local agency enforces a law that prohibits employment discrimination on the same basis. With allegations of age discrimination, the filing deadline[…]

The Problem’s Not Just Porn Anymore

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Computer policies used to be fairly simple: no personal emails, no surfing the internet on company time, and especially no porn. Now, with social media and “the cloud,” there are so many more avenues for trouble. One of the more prevalent issues recently has been who owns Twitter followers when an employee leaves.  The issue is particularly thorny when the employee was hired to manage the employer’s official Twitter account.  The employer will argue that the followers belong to it, because the employee’s job was to send out tweets and increase the number of followers. On the other hand, the employee will argue that the Twitter followers belong to him or her, because they put in all the work to[…]

Monitoring Texas Employees’ Social Media

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A great deal has been written in the last week about whether you should monitor your employees’ social media activity. A lot of very smart folks fall on both sides of the debate, since it can be a rather murky issue involving a balancing act between protecting the company and respecting employees’ right to act as they wish in their time off work. Notice that I didn’t say employees’ privacy. Little, if anything, shared via social media is private, so monitoring social media can hardly be deemed an invasion of privacy. So now I’ll offer my two cents on the subject: it probably isn’t worth it to actively monitor your employees’ social media accounts. Doing so would require a great[…]