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Wages & Hours

Employees may be eligible for workers’ comp if they’re injured in accident while on call

02/01/2007

Ordinarily, an employee who is injured while off duty isn’t eligible for workers’ compensation for those injuries. But a recent Georgia court ruling has expanded liability to protect at least some employees who are hurt while on call …

How to comply with Georgia’s child-labor laws

02/01/2007

Georgia has special child-labor laws that can trip you up if you’re not careful. With federal child-labor laws to consider as well, Georgia employers must navigate a tangled web of regulations when employing young workers …

Delegating Wage-Setting Discretion to Branches Won’t Justify a Class-Action Lawsuit

02/01/2007

Recently, clever lawyers toyed with a new tactic, hoping to turn individual discrimination cases into nationwide class-action monsters. They’d find a single unhappy employee and sue on behalf of all similarly situated employees in a company’s subsidiaries …

Watch for New Prevailing-Wage Rules for Building Services Workers

02/01/2007

The New Jersey Department of Labor & Workforce Development intends to enact new prevailing-wage rules for contractor employees or subcontractors who work on building services projects at properties owned or leased by the state …

You can pay lost wages, then fire reinstated employee

02/01/2007

In a unionized workplace, it can be tricky when an arbitrator—while interpreting a collective-bargaining agreement with the union—second-guesses the employer’s decisions …

Part-time, ‘as-needed’ employees can still sue for bias

02/01/2007

Employees can sue for discrimination if you illegally figure their race, sex, age, religion, disability or pregnancy status into their termination. That’s true even if an employee is a part-timer who works only a few hours on an as-needed basis …

Employee or volunteer? It matters in workers’ comp

02/01/2007

If your organization pays someone a small amount to perform extra tasks around your workplace, are they technically “employees”? Maybe … and that means you may be on the hook for workers’ compensation benefits if the person is hurt on the premises …

Funeral home company sued over wages, bias, harassment

02/01/2007

One of the world’s largest funeral home companies faces a class-action lawsuit by up to 6,000 current and former employees for failure to pay back wages and overtime of between $40 and $70 million …

If you benefit from volunteer labor, prepare to pay for it

02/01/2007

Nonprofits and employers in highly competitive fields often use volunteers to ease labor budgets and try out employees “before they buy.” But unless you structure those situations just right, you’re likely to run afoul of the Fair Labor Standards Act and the New York Minimum Wage Act …

Check cashing ‘convenience fee’ is an illegal deduction under state wage law

02/01/2007

If you force an employee to pay a fee to cash his paycheck, you’re violating the paycheck-deduction provisions of the New York Labor Law …