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Employment Law

Don’t deduct training costs from ex-Employee’s pay

05/01/2005

Q. As part of our new employees’ noncompete contracts, we’ve started including a clause that requires employees to repay the company (through payroll deduction) for training costs if they quit or are fired within one year. Are we OK legally? —S.M., Kentucky

‘Reasonable’ Maternity Leave Doesn’t Matter Under FMLA

05/01/2005

Q. Is there a law or reasonable standard regarding how many weeks maternity leave should be? And should we make that a written policy in our employee handbook? Even with FMLA, to which our employees are entitled, we thought maternity leave was either six or eight weeks, depending on type of delivery. —J.F., Pennsylvania

Pay Traveling Employees for Time Actually Worked

05/01/2005

Q. How should we compensate an hourly employee for an out-of-town, two-day (9 a.m. to 5 p.m.) seminar? In particular, should we pay for the hours during the overnight hotel stay, since the employee must sleep there to be ready for the next day’s session? —N.G., North Carolina

Don’t ‘get tough’ on certain staff; tie punishment to crime

05/01/2005
Issue: Supervisors tend to be quicker in disciplining employees that have given them trouble in the past.
Risk: Singling out certain “troublemakers” for discipline can spur a retaliation lawsuit.
…

Scour your policies now for any traces of age discrimination

05/01/2005
Issue: A new Supreme Court ruling ratchets up your vulnerability to federal age-discrimination lawsuits.
Risk: Employees no longer need to show a “smoking gun.” Even policies that inadvertently discriminate can …

State law dictates employees’ access to personnel file

05/01/2005

Q. An ex-employee whom we fired is now asking to take some documents from his personnel file. Is he legally allowed to do this? Do we have to give him the information just because he’s asking for it? —L.B., North Carolina

Don’t dock pay for time-Clock mistakes

05/01/2005

Q. We dock employees’ pay by 15 minutes if they don’t punch in or out on their timecards. If this happens more than twice over any 90-day period, we write up the employee. We’ve recently been told that we shouldn’t have such a policy. Is that correct? If so, how can we make sure employees punch in? —K.K., Michigan

Shift assignment is your call, not the employee’s

05/01/2005

Q. We’re looking to switch an employee to a different shift, which will better serve the entire shift. Can we force an employee to change shifts even if he’s not interested? —K.C., New York

Cut your legal risks by reworking exit interviews

05/01/2005
Issue: Gaining more value from your exit interviews.
Risk: Intelligence gathered often falls into a “black hole,” so mistakes are repeated and legal land mines are overlooked.
Action: Ask …

Take same-race bias complaints seriously

05/01/2005
Don’t allow discrimination to continue simply because the “discriminator” and “discriminatee” are among the same racial minority. The EEOC is warning that it’s seeing more discrimination complaints between people of the …