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HR Management

Often-overlooked risk: training discrimination

01/07/2014
Make sure supervisors in your organization aren’t playing favorites with some employees at the expense of others. Excluding certain employees from the “inner circle” that get special training, mentoring or promotion opportunities is legally dangerous, as this new ruling shows.

Age Discrimination: ADEA/OWBPA

01/05/2014

HR Law 101: Under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, employers with 20 or more workers can’t engage in personnel practices that discriminate against individuals age 40 and older. Most age discrimination cases grow out of wrongful discharge and mandatory retirement policies, but they can involve any adverse change in working conditions …

Possible porn: Can we search computers?

01/03/2014
Q. An employee recently complained about re­ceiving inappropriate email messages and links to porno­graphic websites from some of her co-workers. We would like to review the messages to figure out exactly how large a problem we face. Can we do this?

Can we withhold double the cost of unreturned equipment from employee’s final paycheck?

01/03/2014
Q. Our employee handbook states, “If you do not return a piece of property we will withhold from your final paycheck the cost of replacing that piece of property.” One of our employees recently quit on the spot. My boss wants to almost double the actual replacement cost of the item. Can we do this?

Pay for voluntary training during lunch?

01/03/2014
Q. If our organization offers voluntary employee training, which takes place during lunch, do we have to pay employees for the time spent attending training?

A hairy problem: Cut biased grooming rules

01/03/2014
Here’s a warning about general grooming standards and disciplining employees over their hairstyle choices: Make sure you apply the same standards to all employees and don’t end up forbidding members of a particular protected class to wear hairstyles that are OK for other workers.

Gaines’ loss: Over $1 million for whistle-blower violations

01/03/2014
OSHA has ordered Gaines Motor Lines, a Hickory-based freight hauling company, to reinstate three workers and pay $1,070,123 in back pay wages, interest, compensatory and punitive damages to four former employees who warned about safety problems.

Adding an arbitration agreement? Make it retroactive

01/03/2014
Are you considering adding an arbitration agreement to your terms and conditions of employment? If you do, make sure the contract includes a retroactive clause that makes arbitration the remedy for past complaints, too.

Dilbert’s creator talks about the passion

01/03/2014
Cartoonist Scott Adams has written a book that skewers traditional business self-improvement manuals as deftly as Catbert the Evil Director of Human Resources regularly rips Dilbert: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.

The HR I.Q. Test: January ’14

01/02/2014
Test your knowledge of recent trends in employment law, comp & benefits and other HR issues with our monthly mini-quiz …