Do you think you have that employee termination all buttoned up, and no one will be able to challenge you? Defending that EEOC charge will be a slam dunk? No plaintiff's lawyer in his right mind would represent your soon-to-be-ex employee?

Are you sure about that? Can we talk?

Don't commit these five firing faux pas*.**

*This is not an all-inclusive list. There are probably more than five.

As promised on Monday, here is my magnum opus regarding the EEOC's new Enforcement Guidance on Pregnancy Discrimination and Related Issues. (Next week, I'll try to get back to spurious sexual harassment lawsuits against Yahoo executives and gift cards to employees who don't go to the bathroom during the work day . . . all that really important stuff.)

This past Monday, July 14, a divided ...

I plan to write more about this later in the week, but today the EEOC issued an Enforcement Guidance, Q&A, and Fact Sheet on pregnancy discrimination and accommodation. (This press release has links to all three.) Much of the Guidance reiterated the law as we had always understood it. However, there are some significant expansions of existing law, and it remains to be seen whether the EEOC ...

Oddities, weirdness, and the strange and unusual from the world of employment law.

I thought only elephants had two-year pregnancies. As I've discussed here before, "pregnancy" for purposes of the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act includes a lot of things besides the actual nine months of physical gestation. Arguably, it includes the period that a woman may be receiving in ...

I presented a webinar this past Wednesday for the Clear Law Institute on the topic of pregnancy and lactation accommodation. As most of our readers know, many state and local governments are passing laws requiring that pregnant women be reasonably accommodated on the job rather than being forced to take medical leaves of absence until after the baby is born. And we are starting to see some ...

Is your company an EEOC target?

I've written before about the Strategic Enforcement Plan of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which was officially adopted last December, and the Commission's priorities. Last week, EEOC Commissioner Victoria Lipnic spoke about the Plan in more detail at legal compliance symposium.

Commissioner Lipnic is a Republican who used to ...

"There's no such thing as work-life balance." -- Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook.

I get the feeling that Sheryl Sandberg is a little conflicted. (Aren't we all!) She's written a book, coming out next month, entitled Lean In, which reportedly is a "call to action" to women to rise to the top of corporate ranks.

Among other things, Sandberg recommends marrying a ...

Is this new UPS pregnancy discrimination decision really such great news for employers?

HINT: Check the dates!!!

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit* held this week that there is no "reasonable accommodation" requirement for pregnancy. The defendant, United Parcel Service, had a collective bargaining agreement that required it to offer light duty in two ...

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued yesterday its draft Strategic Enforcement Plan. If you don't have time to slog through all the introductory material, you won't miss a thing if you skip right to Section III (Priorities). The agency proposes that its priorities will be

*Systemic discrimination cases involving recruitment and hiring. No big surprise there ...

Never . . . well, hardly ever. ("What, never? No, never! What, never? Well . . . hardly ever! He's hardly ever sick at sea . . .")

Our friends at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently scored another big win in a pregnancy discrimination case -- actually got summary judgment against the employer, which is unusual. In this case, the employer apparently knew it had messed up ...