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Compensation & Benefits

Make choice up front: Employee or contractor?

11/11/2010

Adding staff? Decide up front if you want an employee or an independent contractor. Under the FLSA and state law, you must pay overtime to nonexempt employees. Not so for independent contractors. Make the employee-or-contractor call well before you bring someone on board. Don’t assume you can make the designation later. That usually won’t work.

Checking e-mail after hours: Should we pay?

11/11/2010
Q. Several nonexempt employees have smartphones. Do we have to pay them for the time they check work e-mail at home?

Pay cut may be legit reason to quit, collect unemployment

11/11/2010
To deal with a down economy, employers sometimes cut employee pay. A significant pay reduction may be grounds for an employee to quit and collect unemployment.

Don’t automatically concede unemployment to top execs

11/11/2010
Not every employee who loses a job through no fault of his own is eligible for unemployment compensation. About 40 job classifications are ineligible—most of them highly compensated or policy-making positions.

3M will steer retirees off its health plan, into Medicare

11/11/2010

Citing a projected rise in health insurance costs following enactment of the health care reform law, 3M has announced it will soon drop retirees from its own health coverage and instead pay them to sign onto Medicare-backed insurance.

Employee leave: Paid holidays trends for 2011

11/11/2010

Even though the economic climate remains tenuous, most employers will continue to offer the same number of paid holidays to employees in 2011 as in past years, says a new Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) survey. Here is the breakdown of each holiday …

Prepare for payroll confusion in new year unless Congress takes action

11/11/2010
Unless a lame duck Congress acts by Dec. 31 to keep some of the so-called “Bush tax cuts,” tax rates will increase on Jan. 1, 2011, as pre-2001 rates go back into effect. That’s bound to upset employees who will find themselves with less take-home pay.

HR after the mid-terms: What’s Washington going to do?

11/09/2010
Republicans captured control of the House of Representatives in the mid-term elections, while Democrats retained a slim majority in the Senate. With a Democrat in the White House and a divided Congress, what does that mean for the HR-related issues that have dominated the headlines for the last two years? Here’s our rundown of the likely legislative scenarios.

EEOC issues final GINA regulations

11/09/2010
The EEOC has just issued final regulations implementing the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act (GINA), the federal law that makes it illegal for employers to use genetic information to make decisions about health insurance and employment. Download the final regs here, and then use them as the basis for reviewing your wellness program and other work processes that might violate GINA.

Wife’s pregnancy complications warrant granting FMLA leave

11/08/2010
Some employers mistakenly believe that fathers aren’t allowed to take time off before their child is born to deal with prenatal complications.