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Employment Law

A good deed punished: Voluntary FMLA leave can become a mandate

07/20/2009

Under the FMLA, only employers that have 50 or more employees within 75 miles of the company’s work site are required to provide FMLA leave to their employees. The requirement is commonly known as the “50/75 rule.” Can an employer that has fewer than 50 employees within 75 miles of the company’s work site willingly agree to provide its employees with FMLA rights and benefits? That situation recently occurred in Reaux v. Infohealth Management Corp.

Can we require riffed employees to sign a release before they receive severance pay?

07/20/2009

Q. Under our company policy, employees who are terminated because of a reduction in force are entitled to severance pay. Can we require them to execute a release in order to receive severance pay?

How much access must we grant when an employee asks to see his personnel file?

07/20/2009

Q. One of our employees has asked to review his personnel file. Must we grant his request?

Can we deduct from his paycheck? Employee ruined a company-issued laptop

07/20/2009

Q. One of our employees was issued a company laptop and later corrupted it by downloading games and other nonbusiness software. Can we recover the value of the damaged property from this employee’s next paycheck?

How far can our company go in prohibiting employees from smoking?

07/20/2009

Q. We are committed to providing a healthy and safe environment for our workforce. To that end, we strictly prohibit smoking on company property. Can we also prohibit employees from smoking during their lunch breaks and outside of work?

There’s a big difference between ‘unfair’ and illegal

07/20/2009

Every employer’s goal should be to manage employees in a manner that’s blind to race, sex, age and disability. That doesn’t always happen. But it’s important to realize that it’s only when unfairness harms members of a protected class that the practice is illegal.

You don’t have to provide vacation pay

07/17/2009

Are you considering ways to weather the current economic storm? Perhaps you can cut some benefits, at least for new hires and maybe for current employees, too. For example, nothing in California law (or federal law, for that matter) requires you to offer vacation time or pay.

When labor, immigration laws clash, NLRB decides

07/17/2009

The Department of Homeland Security has authorized more raids on workplaces it suspects include undocumented workers—and employers, not the workers, are being charged with breaking the law. At the same time, the NLRB is pushing employers to settle unfair labor practice cases and ordering them to rehire employees terminated for exercising National Labor Relations Act rights. But what happens when those fired workers are actually ineligible to work?

You can require arbitration of termination wage claims

07/17/2009

It can be months or years of administrative hearings to decide how much you are obliged to pay terminated employees. That’s one reason the Court of Appeal of California has begun advocating arbitration as a legal alternative to hearings.

Tell bosses: Work sexual harassment rules apply to other business relationships, too

07/17/2009

Warn your supervisors and managers: If they sexually harass business associates who aren’t your employees, those associates can sue for sexual harassment, too. The harassment has to meet the same standards as in the employment setting.