The U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, has issued a new guide for employers on the Family and Medical Leave Act. I've only thumbed through it, but it seems to be pretty nicely done, and has some cute comics about the FMLA request/approval process.

(Seems like Will and Brenda could be a little friendlier, though.)

Here it is.

UPDATE (4/29/16): Here is the new FMLA poster

No one is immune from wage-hour payouts. Not even a Human Resources consultant.

California HR consulting firm TriNet has reportedly agreed to pay approximately $1 million in overtime and liquidated damages to 267 employees. The payment is in settlement of a wage-hour investigation conducted by the San Francisco office of the U.S. Department of Labor.

According to the DOL ...

NOTE FROM ROBIN: Welcome to our Los Angeles-Century City Office, and to Steve Katz, who will be posting from time to time about the most peculiar of California’s employment laws.

California's wage orders, which regulate working conditions for most industries and occupations, require that "[a]ll working employees shall be provided with suitable seats when the nature of the work ...

The final version of the U.S. Department of Labor rule on white-collar overtime exemptions was sent this week to the Office of Management and Budget, the last stage before issuance of the Rule. For our coverage of the proposed rule, issued last summer, please visit these links:

Proposed Overtime Rule Would More Than Double Salary Threshold for Exempt Employees

Will "Duties Test" Be ...

A federal judge in Indiana dismissed yesterday all that remained of a lawsuit filed by student athletes, alleging that they were "employees" and therefore entitled to the minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Don Prophete, Jim Goh, and Steve Moore of Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete, LLP, represented the NCAA and hundreds of the university defendants.

The suit was ...

This is scary.

You'd think a person with "Manager" in her job title who was making more than $89,000 a year would be exempt from the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Not necessarily.

A federal judge in Maine ruled that Bottomline Technologies, Inc., a financial processing services company, will have to face a jury trial on the wage-and-hour claims of Debra* Colello ...

Who's been naughty and who's been nice in labor and employment law? Here are my picks for 2015. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

NAUGHTY!

The National Labor Relations Board, for being naughty in too many ways to mention. Its rules on employer handbook policies, including confidentiality and social media, are unrealistic and almost impossible for employers to legally follow ...

Chanukah starts at sundown this Sunday, and Christmas is only three short weeks away. Can you throw a workplace holiday party that won't result in a lawsuit? It has been ages since we've had a quiz. Let's do it!

For more on this topic, please listen to the webinar on holiday parties that I did yesterday with Laura Kerekes and the excellent people at ThinkHR. The replay is available here.

To find out why there is so much wage-hour litigation, read my point-counterpoint interview with plaintiff's attorney Fran Rudich, published in the November 25 edition of Bloomberg BNA's FLSA Litigation Tracker.

(Reproduced with permission from FLSA Litigation Tracker, 2015 FLLTR 6 (Nov. 25, 2015). Copyright 2015 by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (800-372-1033) <http://www.bna.com>)

Thanks ...

NOTE FROM ROBIN: Ellen Kearns is head of our Boston Office and co-chair of the firm's Wage-Hour Practice Group.

The new overtime white-collar exemption rule will be issued approximately July 2016, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's fall 2015 regulatory agenda, which the Office of Management and Budget published just before Thanksgiving.

I had earlier reported that ...