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Employment Law

Fear of violence: Can we terminate employee who has mental illness?

06/06/2017
Q. We discovered that one of our employees has a history of unprovoked violent fits due to schizophrenia. We certainly sympathize with our employee’s struggle, but we also worry about the safety of customers and other employees. Does state law allow us to fire him for this reason?

Can a thermostat adjustment really be an ADA reasonable accommodation?

06/06/2017
Q. One of our employees suffers from arthritis and has complained that the temperature of the office triggers joint pain. She has requested that we heat the entire office to 80 degrees Fahrenheit as an accommodation of her disability. Must we do so?

Palo Alto firm pays big to settle discrimination charges

06/06/2017
Palantir Technologies in Palo Alto has agreed to settle charges it discriminated against Asian applicants who sought engineering positions at the tech firm.

Bill would raise overtime threshold in California

06/06/2017
Assembly Member Tony Thurmond (D-Richmond) has proposed raising California’s overtime threshold to the higher of $3,956 per month ($47,472 annually) or twice the state’s minimum wage for executive, administrative and or professional employees.

Lost acknowledgment won’t sink arbitration agreement

06/06/2017
A case will go to arbitration even though the employer couldn’t find a signed acknowledgment page showing an employee agreed to arbitrate disputes. Because the employer made it a standard practice to have applicants sign such acknowledgments, the court said the employee was bound by the agreement.

Boss is equally demanding on everyone? That’s no excuse for employee lawsuit

06/06/2017
Some supervisors are more demanding than others. That’s no reason to sue, as long as the boss heaps demands equally on everyone, regardless of protected characteristics.

9th Circuit: Equal Pay Act allows past pay as excuse for current pay differences

06/06/2017
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has concluded that employers are free to use past pay as the starting point for a compensation offer as long as they can justify the practice as having a legitimate business purpose. That’s true even if using past pay ends up perpetuating past pay discrimination.

Is that an FMLA need, or just chaos at home?

06/06/2017
Employees who want to take FMLA leave must let their employers know. They don’t have to specifically ask for FMLA leave, but they do have to provide enough information for the employer to understand that the worker or a family member suffers from a serious health condition. Merely describing a chaotic life full of difficult events isn’t enough.

Title alone doesn’t make someone a manager

06/06/2017
As far as the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and California’s wage-and-hour-laws are concerned, how you label a job is absolutely irrelevant to its genuine exempt/nonexempt status. Classification is based solely on the work the employee performs. Put simply, calling someone a manager doesn’t make him one.

$1.9 million to settle EEOC race bias lawsuit against Chicago restaurants

06/06/2017
The owners of 13 Italian restaurants in Chicago have agreed to pay $1.9 million to settle an EEOC class-action suit alleging they routinely refused to hire black job applicants.