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Employment Law

Can part-timers be salaried workers?

04/30/2014
Q. Can we pay any of our part-time employees as salaried employees?

Union wants election at Lumber Bridge, N.C. poultry plant

04/30/2014
The union that represents employees at the Smithfield Foods plant in Tar Heel put on the feed bag in March to publicize efforts to organize employees at another company’s plant nearby. The goal: To build support for forcing a union election at the Mountainaire Farms poultry plant in Lumber Bridge.

Devout UNC-Wilmington prof wins promotion and back pay

04/30/2014
A federal judge has affirmed a jury award to a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Mike Adams claimed university administrators praised him when he was an atheist, but black-balled him after he became a Christian.

Robeson County, N.C. rues teacher rankings under new law

04/30/2014
Hard on the heels of enactment of a new North Carolina law designed to eliminate tenure for public school teachers, the Robeson County Schools have reluctantly developed a point system to rank its teachers. No one, it seems, likes it—not school administrators and not teachers.

Choose short leave as ADA accommodation

04/30/2014
New employees aren’t entitled to FMLA leave, but they may be eligible for a short medical leave under the ADA instead. Sometimes, that’s the best accommodation to choose.

Does a ‘shy bladder’ constitute a disability?

04/30/2014

Some jobs are so safety-sensitive that employers are required to perform drug and alcohol tests on employees. For example, Department of Trans­­por­­ta­­tion regulations require regular tests for commercial truck drivers. But what if an employee can’t produce a urine sample?

Don’t know when injured worker can return? You don’t have to offer indefinite leave

04/30/2014

Some employees who become temporarily disabled may be entitled to reasonable accommodations such as a temporary reassignment, reduced hours or similar temporary assistance. An employee might even be entitled to leave beyond accumulated sick, vacation and FMLA time. But that’s only true if the time off will be for a finite period of time.

How to raise discrimination red flags: Deviate from usual promotion policies

04/30/2014

It doesn’t take much to get a lawsuit going. Employees just have to show that discrimination may be the reason why they weren’t promoted or failed to receive benefit of employment that was afforded to someone of a different race, sex or other protected characteristic. Something as simple as an employer not following its own promotion policies will do the trick.

North Carolina among top 10 states for 2013 EEOC charges

04/30/2014
Ten states—mostly home to the nation’s largest cities or located in the South—accounted for 56% of all EEOC charges filed in 2013. North Carolina logged the sixth highest total.

ACA may be boosting employer-sponsored health coverage

04/25/2014
According to a new RAND Corp. study on the effects of the Affordable Care Act, 7.2 million previously uninsured workers gained health insurance through their employers between September 2013 and March 2014.