According to a new survey by health insurance company HealthPartners, health care costs are the biggest obstacle to business expansion for Minnesota businesses. Almost two-thirds of companies said health costs jumped 10 percent or more in the past two years, with a quarter reporting costs increasing by more than 20 percent Many employers blame [...]
Beware of stereotyping employees!
As reported on Work Place Prof Blog, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers Minnesota) issued an interesting opinion in a sex stereotyping/appearance case this week. In Lewis v. Heartland Inns, the court found that the plaintiff had presented enough evidence to suggest that she was fired for not conforming to stereotypes about how women [...]
Testing the limits of FMLA leave
A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled last week that the Family and Medical Leave Act does not provide protection to an employee who took a seven-week trip to the Philippines to participate in a faith healing event with her husband. Maria Tayag worked as clerk at Lahey Hospital. Her husband had a number of serious [...]
The next protected category: Gender Identity
The federal government recently added language to its jobs website banning discrimination in federal hiring on the basis of gender identity (i.e. transgendered status). While the government has apparently prohibited such discrimination for several years, the move is nonetheless being hailed by civil rights groups and denounced by conservative ones. Minnesota employers know that the [...]
Local laws prohibit discrimination against caregivers
A new report from the Center for Worklife Law concludes that at least 63 local governments in 22 states—including some of the nation’s major urban areas—have passed employment anti‐discrimination laws that go beyond federal and state statutes to ensure that those with caregiving responsibilities are not discriminated against at work. Cases filed under these laws may [...]
Supreme Court to hear case on privacy rights of public employees
The Supreme Court will hear a case later this term which will help establish the contours of privacy in the workplace, although the focus will be on public employees, not private. Sgt. Jeff Quon was a member of the Ontario, California police department. The department had a written policy reserving the right to monitor “network [...]
Ready for some privacy turducken?
The Supreme Court seems likely to accept a case involving background checks on employees who do contract work for the government, a legal hodgepodge which one judge has analogized to a turducken (a turkey stuffed with a duck and a chicken). The case was brought by a group of scientists and engineers at the Jet [...]
Employers: Take care with background checks
The EEOC has sued a nationwide convention company alleging a pattern or practice of unlawful discrimination because the company has rejected job applicants based on their credit history, or if they have had one or more of various types of criminal charges or convictions. The EEOC alleges that this practice has had an unlawful discriminatory [...]
Privacy 101
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 [...]
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 [...]
