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Employment Law

Accruing sick leave during workers’ comp leave

04/01/2006

Q. One of our employees is out on workers’ comp. Our contract says “no sick time will be lost or deducted” while employees are out on workers’ comp. But now he wants to know if he continues to accrue sick time and holiday pay while not working. Does he? —J.S., Michigan

How to cope with seriously ill employees

04/01/2006
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Basing pay on past salary alone may spark a legal claim

04/01/2006
Issue: Employers often set new hires’ wages, in part, based on salaries at previous jobs.
Risk: A new court ruling says you could run afoul of the Equal Pay Act …

Illegal workers’ presence continues to grow

04/01/2006

Undocumented immigrants now make up almost 5 percent of the U.S. work force, according to a new Pew Hispanic Center study. The number of people living illegally in the country rose by at least 400,000 last year …

Employee accessing child porn: Just saying ‘Stop’ isn’t enough

03/01/2006

When it comes to what your employees do on the Internet, "Hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil" is a bad policy. If you know someone is using company assets and company time to engage in illegal activity, you may be obligated to report the activity to the appropriate authorities …

Know the Legal Boundaries of Employee Lie-Detector Testing

03/01/2006

In most cases, requiring private-sector employees to take polygraph tests will create more harm than good. That’s because the Employee Polygraph Protection Act makes it illegal to "require, request, suggest or cause an employee or prospective employee to take or submit to any lie-detector test," except in limited circumstances …

Mandatory Off-Site Counseling Sessions May Be Paid ‘Work Time’

03/01/2006

If you require hourly employees to attend counseling or training workshops outside normal working hours as a condition of employment, you may need to pay employees for those hours. You may also need to pay the employees’ travel time, too …

Nonrenewal of Contract After Whistle-Blowing May Be Illegal

03/01/2006

Don’t assume that just because you hire people as independent contractors, you can’t be liable for wrongful termination if you don’t renew their contracts. As a new court ruling shows, if an employee blows the whistle about some potentially illegal activity at your workplace, you could trigger a retaliation lawsuit by failing to renew his or her contract …

Put yourself in employees’ shoes to decide if they’re disabled

03/01/2006

Some ailments obviously rise to the level of "disability" under the ADA. Others are more marginal. To help you make that decision, try to look at life from that employee’s point of view. It’s a common trial tactic used by plaintiffs’ lawyers to help sway juries in ADA cases …

Medication may limit employees’ FMLA reinstatement rights

03/01/2006

What happens if an employee tries to return to work after FMLA leave but isn’t quite recovered? In that case, you can turn the employee away if he or she can’t perform the job’s essential functions. That scenario often plays out when the returning employee’s job involves operating machinery or driving and the person must take medication …