Archive for the ‘Federal Labor Law’ Category

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) earlier  this year held a series of meetings to look into the issue of businesses' refusing to hire the unemployed and blatantly announcing so in their help wanted advertisements. Now, New Jersey has taken matters into its own hands and outlawed ads that exclude the unemployed, whether the ads [...]

Wal-Mart is all over the news as the U.S. Supreme Court decides whether to let a massive class-action, gender-discrimination lawsuit with the potential for a multi-million-dollar judgment to go forward. Meanwhile, NERA Economic Consulting has pored through public records of 187 settlements based on wage-and-hour violations from 2007 to 2010 and found that, though the [...]

The U.S. Supreme Court today (March 22, 2011) overturned the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals' ruling that, to be valid, complaints under the anti-retaliation provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) must be in writing. In Kasten v. Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, the justices rejected what they termed a "narrow interpretation" of language in the [...]

The $65-million Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, beset by spidery actors falling from the heights and landing on the stage from the beginning of rehearsals, is now facing $12,500 in fines from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which issued four citations on Friday (March 4, 2011). That's not all. In February, [...]

"Cat's paw" is a legal term referring to someone's influencing another person to do something (illegal, obviously) and thus potentially becoming liable as well. For instance in work-related circumstances, if a department manager has it in for a certain employee and the employee is then fired by his or her direct supervisor for performance reasons, [...]

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) employs 2.1 million people, but just 2,335 of them are field inspectors. The agency is thus requesting an additional $24.7 million in its fiscal year 2012 budget to expand by 52 inspectors. As budget negotiations stall in Congress over how deep to cut spending, the fate of the [...]

Although a government shutdown over budget priorities may be looming, that didn't stop the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) from requesting an additional $18 million in funding for fiscal year 2012 to increase the ranks of its inspectors from 2,371 to 2,557—a 9.2-percent jump. The budget request for $385.5 million (an increase of 9.5 percent) [...]

The federal E-Verify online employment eligibility verification system, which began as a program named Basic Pilot, has long been used by employers to verify documents submitted by job applicants purporting to show their legal right to work in the United States. However, if an applicant submitted perfectly valid documents (passport, driver's license,social security card, visa, [...]

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) held hearings yesterday (Feb. 15, 2011) into the causes and consequences of a recent trend in hiring—the unemployed need not apply. Phrases such as "no unemployed candidates will be considered" and "must be currently employed" are now peppering job postings and want ads. This has the EEOC concerned that [...]

The U.S. Supreme Court may end up deciding the issue, but for now one circuit court is saying yea and another nay to whether pharmaceutical sales representatives are eligible for overtime pay. The issue centers on the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) exemption from overtime rules for those employees who are engaged in outside sales. [...]