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 ...

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 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

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 ...

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 ...

Bruce Carton of Legal Blog Watch (via Overlawyered.com) notes the passing of Nordstrom's employee "handbook," which consisted of a single index card with the admonition to "use good judgment in all situations." Meanwhile, at Minding the Workplace and Jottings By An Employer's Lawyer, the authors note that many, if not all, of our workplace problems -- particularly ...

You kiss your mother with that mouth? Evil HR Lady has an entertaining discussion about a nasty e-mail she received from a "cusser" who didn't like the fact that she had expressed opposition to cussing at work. (Not all cussing -- just the "every other word out of your mouth" variety.) Anyway, the e-mail contained -- you guessed it -- cussing just about every other word. To provide the flavor ...

In my previous post, I noted that litigation under the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act was starting to emerge from its dormant stage and promised to provide some best practices for employers to follow.

The most important thing to remember about the ADAAA is that, for the most part, all it does is change (albeit drastically) the definition of "disability." The ADAAA does ...

The ADAAA sleeping giant is finally awake . . . and he's not a morning person. The Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act, which dramatically expanded the definition of "disability" in the Americans with Disabilities Act, was signed into law by President George W. Bush in September 2008 and took effect in January 2009. However, it has taken until now for some of the cases applying ...