Thanks so much to all of you who elected Employment & Labor Insider to the ABA Blawg 100 for another year. We appreciate you more than you know.

I would also like to thank my colleagues who contributed posts this year and helped get us where we are today: Cara Crotty, Tommy Eden, Ellen Kearns, Marcia McShane,  David Phippen, and David Smith.

Congratulations also to fellow employment blog ...

Bless their hearts.

Employers, it is a losing battle to debate theology with your employees who request religious accommodation. If you don't believe me, ask Consolidated Coal Company and its parent, CONSOL Energy, which have been ordered to pay more than half a million dollars to an employee who retired rather than have his hand scanned by a biometric screener, which he believed was ...

We have reached the fifth and final of our five harassment "must-haves": No retaliation.

It should be easy to avoid retaliation, right? Because retaliatory conduct is intentional - you can't "accidentally" retaliate against someone. You can't "negligently" seek payback.

To retaliate, you have to work at it.

Of course, that would make life way too simple. Employers can ...

NOTE: As I breathlessly reported last week, the EEOC has issued its long-awaited proposed rule on employer wellness programs and the Americans with Disabilities Act. (Here is a nicer copy than the one that was available then.) Brian Magargle, who knows a lot more than I do about the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the Affordable Care Act, and I are ...

Last October, I posted about a consent decree entered into between Wal-Mart and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in which Wal-Mart agreed to pay $72,500 to candidate for a store job in Maryland whose offer was withdrawn because she couldn’t undergo a urine test for drugs.

The candidate had end-stage renal disease.

Now, Kmart has been hit, too, in a case involving almost ...

From a labor and employment law standpoint, I'm not sure we have a lot to be thankful for this year. But 'tis the season, so here are a paltry few:

Be thankful that your employer doesn't fire you while you're on the air. Ben Finfer, co-host of a Chicago sports talk radio show learned that he was losing his job through a tweet that came through while he was on the air last week. Mr. Finfer ...

As of this week, we have a new challenge to an employer based on medical marijuana – this time, in Rhode Island.

The state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit alleging that Darlington Fabrics Corporation discriminated against a candidate for a paid intern position because the candidate, Christine Callaghan, disclosed that she used medical marijuana for her ...

Laura Jones was offered a sales job at the Wal-Mart store in Cockeysville, Maryland, and was told that she would have to take a drug test. According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Ms. Jones told an assistant store manager that she had end stage renal cancer, which prevented her from taking a urine test. The EEOC says that Jones then went to the drug testing collection ...

Brandon Coats was partially paralyzed in a car crash as a teenager, using a wheelchair, and has been a medical marijuana patient since 2010 when he discovered that using pot helped calm violent seizures and muscle spasms. Coats was a telephone call-center operator with Dish Network for three years before he failed a cheek-swab random drug test in 2010 and was fired. Dish Network has a ...

Bloomberg BNA reports this afternoon that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed two transgender discrimination lawsuits yesterday, the agency's first ever against private-sector employers. One is against a Michigan funeral home, and the other is against a medical clinic in Lakeland, Florida. Both cases appear to involve straightforward discrimination ...