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Employment Law

Condé Nast ends internships

01/08/2014
Condé Nast, publisher of The New Yorker, Vogue, GQ and 26 other magazines, has stopped offering unpaid internships following legal fallout from 2012’s “Black Swan” lawsuit.

ADA accommodations too costly? Too bad!

01/08/2014
Don’t let cost-cutting measures derail ADA reasonable accommodations requests. Offering an accommodation may be far cheaper than losing a failure-to-accommodate lawsuit.

EEOC: Fewer bias claims in 2013, bigger bucks

01/08/2014

Charges of job discrimination traditionally spike during recessions. And that certainly happened during the Great Recession, as employee job-bias complaints filed with the EEOC reached all-time highs of more than 99,000 complaints in 2010, 2011 and 2012. However, an improving economy had employees in a less litigious mood during fiscal year 2013.

ADA: Mental Disabilities

01/08/2014

HR Law 101: A few years ago, the EEOC released guidelines that clarify employers’ responsibilities in applying the ADA to workers with psychiatric disabilities. The law protects persons with mental disabilities, and employers must reasonably accommodate them …

5th Circuit rejects NLRB D.R. Horton decision on class-action waivers

01/07/2014
In a major win for employers, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the highly controversial D.R. Horton decision from the NLRB.

MCM Grande & MCM Elegante pay $79,000 in back wages

01/07/2014
A U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division investigation has resulted in the MCM Grande and MCM Elegante hotels paying back wages and missed overtime to em­­ployees at several of its locations in Texas and New Mexico.

Operator tech sues chemical company for sex discrimination

01/07/2014
A former employee at Lanxess Corp. has sued her former employer, claiming the company discriminated against her because of her gender. She recounts male employees telling her “women aren’t supposed to be back here” and that it was “not a woman’s job.”

Words matter at work: Beware these 5 ‘lightning rod’ terms

01/07/2014
Layoff or firing? Probationary or permanent em­­ployee? Using the wrong employment-related terminology with an employee can expose your company to costly lawsuits.

ADA: Employer gets to choose accommodation

01/07/2014
It’s the employer that gets to choose a reasonable accommodation for a disabled worker, not the employee. While a disabled worker may prefer one solution over another, that’s not relevant.

Class matters when discrimination is alleged

01/07/2014
Employees who claim they were disciplined more severely than other employees have to compare themselves to similarly situated workers outside their protected class. They can’t claim someone in their same class got better treatment.