Two interesting stories on privacy issues this morning.
First, Acorn is having even more problems because a republican activist did a little dumpster diving behind its offices in San Diego and came out with a bunch of documents containing social security and driver’s license numbers of its members and job applicants. Ouch!
Second, Sen. Patrick Leahy is [...]
Privacy 101
Employers: Time to check your wage and hour compliance
The Department of Labor announced Friday that it has hired an additional 250 wage and hour investigators to respond more quickly to complaints and undertake more targeted enforcement of wage and hour laws.
In the past three months, the Labor Department has brought two enforcement cases that resulted in the recovery of nearly $2 million in [...]
Immigration is expanding its audit program for illegal workers
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced yesterday that it is expanding a program for auditing companies’ hiring practices, and that it notified 1,000 companies this week that they would have to undergo such a review.
It appears that the audits will primarily affect private companies with some connection to public safety and national security, such as [...]
The Changing Face of Labor Unions
The Workplace Prof Blog has picked up on a new report from The Center for Economic and Policy Research about demographic changes in the labor movement in the last 25 years. According to the report:
Women now make up over 45 percent of unionized workers, up from just 35 percent in 1983.
Latinos are the fastest growing [...]
GINA is coming this Saturday (no, not Geena Davis)
The new federal Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) takes effect for employers with over 15 employees this Saturday, November 21, 2009. Some are calling this the “most important new anti-discrimination law in two decades.”
The new law prohibits employers from requesting or considering genetic testing or genetic background information in hiring, firing or promotions. More specifically, [...]
What color communicator are you and your employees?
What I find most interesting in this article about stopping workplace gossip is not the company’s use of an “agreement to values” which prohibits back-stabbing, gossiping and the like; its the use of color-coded name plates to advise what communication style a particular employee prefers. Red is for those who are direct and to the [...]
Did UnitedHealth Group cross a line by asking its employees to lobby against health care reform?
Minneapolis-based UnitedHealth Group is taking some heat for providing form letters to its 75,000 U.S. employees opposing aspects of the health care reform bill working its way through Congress. The company also urged employees to write letters to local newspapers and then share those letters with the company’s lobbying arm.
One of the form letters provided by UHG makes [...]
The importance of performing a disparate impact analysis in Reductions in Force
A federal jury on Tuesday awarded more than $6.2 million in an age discrimination suit brought by two scientists who said they were fired from their jobs at a Pennsylvania chemical manufacturing company when the company targeted only older workers in layoffs in 2005. The case highlights the importance of statistically analyzing the effects of [...]
