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HR Management

After the Election: How Employers Must Prepare for Political Change

11/05/2008

When Barack Obama takes office in January, it may signal a time of enormous change for the world of labor and employment law. Depending on how many Senate seats Democrats control, here are two potential scenarios for change, the eight key legislative issues in the hopper and what you can do right now to prepare …

4 tips for doing your job like a master geek

11/04/2008

What are the best online tools to help you get things done smarter and faster? Gina Trapani, lead blogger for Lifehacker.com and author of Upgrade Your Life, is an expert at helping people master modern technology. Here’s how everyday Joes and Janes can be like master geeks, she says.

Can you legally search a worker’s locked desk?

11/04/2008

Employees may think of “their” desks as their own private domains—safe places to keep their own things literally under lock and key. However, employers do have the right to open that locked drawer. When the desk is in an open area shared with other employees, the employee with the key doesn’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Do we have any recourse when employee badmouths us on Facebook?

10/30/2008

Q. We discovered that an employee has posted false, profane statements about our company and managers on his Facebook page. What can we do? …

Lawyer’s letter says don’t destroy ex-worker’s records—now what?

10/29/2008

Q. My department recently received a “litigation hold letter” from an attorney’s office. It instructed us not to delete or destroy any documents belonging to a former employee of ours … While we have a few documents related to this person’s employment, the significant majority of her personnel documents were destroyed through our normal record-retention process. Are we required to comply with this litigation hold letter …? If so, what can we do about the documents already deleted?

New Purdue University policy grants paid parental leave

10/28/2008

Purdue University implemented a new parental leave policy in October that grants paid time off to either parent for a birth or adoption. The policy provides up to six weeks of paid leave for the birth mother and up to three weeks for the father of the child or same-sex domestic partner of the birth mother …

Employee does not have to specify race to invoke protection

10/28/2008

Bernard Pettis, who is black, worked for R.R. Donnelley as a materials handler, loading skids for press operator Tim Cain. Whenever Cain, who is white, helped Pettis seal the skids, he would smash Pettis’ hands under the top board, then laugh and tell co-workers, “I got his hands,” or “Ooh, look at him.”

Workplace violence: Recognizing the threats, reducing the danger

10/28/2008

If you’ve ever visited YouTube.com, you may have clicked on videos showing an assortment of office meltdowns. Laptops get smashed, desks are overturned. While some of these are funny to watch, each one probably made you think, “Man, I hope nothing like that ever happens at our office.” Sad to say, it could …

N.J. Supreme Court sets rules for proving religious discrimination

10/27/2008

The New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled for the first time on the proof employees must offer to make a religion-based hostile work environment claim stick. The case, Cutler v. Dorn, established that New Jersey courts must decide workplace religious discrimination claims using the same legal standards they use in racial and gender discrimination claims.

There’s getting hurt … then there’s the fear of getting hurt

10/27/2008

Here’s a tale of workplace terror so harrowing that one of the characters even used a pseudonym when he filed for workers’ comp … for injuries he had yet to receive.