Human Resources and in-house counsel, please consider this a legal "consumer report." Remember - we offer a "no legalese" guarantee, or your money back!

My fellow employment lawyers, is that Rule 12(b)(6) motion really necessary?

I've spent this week reviewing federal and state labor and employment law decisions for a Bar Association program I'll be presenting at the end of the ...

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 ...

Earlier this summer, in writing about reference information for bad employees (I call them "the Axis of Evil"), I mentioned employment investigations, noting that this was a topic for another post. Well, today is the day. Now that the Supreme Court has officially recognized "cat's paw" liability for employers whose decisions are tainted by an individual with an unlawful motive, it ...

Odds and ends from the employment law world this week:

Facebook rant about wages didn't create retaliation claim. Molly DiBianca of the Delaware Employment Law Blog reports on a decision from a federal court in Florida saying that a Facebook rant about an employer's alleged violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act overtime provisions was not "protected activity" that would trigger ...

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently held a meeting with "a battery of experts" on disparate treatment in hiring. According to the EEOC, hiring discrimination continues to run rampant.

Time for a grain of salt here: According to the EEOC's press release, most of the experts were from the EEOC, or were individuals who had been denied jobs and claimed they were ...

In my opinion, the Supreme Court's decision issued Monday in Wal-Mart v. Dukes is fantastic for employers. Not all class action litigation is a racket, but much of it is, and plaintiffs' lawyers have been known to use the threat of financial devastation resulting from nationwide class suits to pressure employers into paying large settlements.

(No, really? You don't say!)

The Supreme ...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit (Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming) recently affirmed the dismissal of a race discrimination lawsuit against a union whose hiring hall refused to refer the plaintiff for laborer positions. Essentially, the Court said that the union was justified because the plaintiff had three no-rehire letters in his file from ...

A few weeks ago, I posted my thoughts about how the expanded definition of "disability" under the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act will affect administration of the Family and Medical Leave Act. I promised to follow up with a post about the impact of the ADAAA on the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act "unless more pressing news intervene[d]."

As expected ...

According to a recent study, organized religion is being "driven to extinction" from nine countries, including Canada, Ireland, the Czech Republic, and Switzerland. Although the United States is not on the list, studies here have also shown an increase in the number of people who call themselves "unaffiliated."

Meanwhile, American workplaces continue to struggle with the issue of ...

Everybody on the employer side likes to pick on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the temptation is even greater now that its chair has taken such an aggressive stance on issues like pre-employment credit and background checks. However, employers occasionally shoot themselves in the foot (feet?) with the agency by making mistakes that only compound their problems. If ...