One common employer practice that I have never liked is requiring employees who call in sick to bring in a doctor's note. I'm not talking about extended or recurring absences that would be covered by the Family and Medical Leave Act, or time off that would be covered under a short-term or long-term disability policy, or requests for reasonable accommodation under the Americans with ...

I am disappointed that the NLRB "Facebook Firing" case settled, even though I certainly understand why both sides wanted to end it.

In November, the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint against American Medical Response of Connecticut, alleging that the company committed an unfair labor practice by firing an emergency medical technician who had posted some ...

Latest dispatches from the employment law front:

If you're going to be an SOB, make sure you're an SOB to everybody. A federal district court in Kentucky granted summary judgment to the employer in a sexual harassment case. The female plaintiffs alleged that a charlatan "turnaround specialist" hired by their CEO was not "motivated by sexual desire" but was simply abusive and ...

The recession has undoubtedly been tough on the oldest of the older crowd, and rumor has it that blatant age discrimination is the reason.

For example, see TLNT's What Discrimination Looks Like in 2011: It's Older and Unemployed, and the recent story in which Home Depot fired an 80-year-old supervisor in New York because she purchased 24 cents' worth of screws so that she could get ...

The Cynical Girl has a great list of The Top Ten Reasons Why Your Boss Doesn't Like You. On a somewhat related note, here are some recent cases from employment law plaintiffs' bizarro world, for your weekend reading pleasure:

Naw, I'm pretty sure I was fired because of my race. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) has affirmed

Who, if anybody, has the right to use the "N" word in the workplace? Should an employer treat African-Americans who use this language differently from non-African-Americans who do?

These are perennial questions that arise during harassment training, and there has been little guidance from the courts or the EEOC. The opinions of individual lawyers no doubt vary. My own advice has been ...

Swiss bank UBS has been the butt of some teasing for its strict, extremely precise, and sometimes incomprehensible employee dress code. Particularly puzzling is its requirement that men's neckties match "the morphology of the face." (I've done a good bit of internet surfing trying to find out exactly what this means, without much luck. A commenter at Evil HR Lady says it means that men ...

One of my favorite Christmas movies is the 1947 version of Miracle on 34th Street, but ever since I became an employment lawyer, I have not been able to watch it without thinking about how different the story would be today.

For our readers who are not black-and-white movie buffs, here is a summary of the plot: A nice little old man named Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) is strolling down the ...

A couple of recently reported decisions -- one involving pregnancy discrimination, and the other involving state-law tort claims -- indicate that some employers may need to get their acts together. Of course, the decisions were issued at preliminary stages of the litigation, so let us hope that these bosses aren't really as bad as their employees have made them sound.

"Women and ...

"This is an employment-at-will state, and I can fire you for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all." Technically, this is true in most states, but in effect it is a lie which employers rely on at their peril.

Suzanne Lucas of The Evil HR Lady has a post about an individual (sex not specified) whose employer offered him/her a different position in the company. When the employee ...