F*** My Boss; F*** his mother; F*** his family… Fuggetaboutit

Darrell VanDeusen
Darrell VanDeusen
04/07/2015
So, what’s the big deal?   That doesn’t get you fired. At least that’s what the NLRB says. As long as you say it on Facebook during a union campaign. And you’re a union supporter. And you add “Vote YES for the union.” Pier Sixty, LLC, 362 NLRB No. 59 (March 31, 2015). Hernan Perez worked for Pier Sixty, a catering company in New York City. Some employees wanted a union, “in part because of concerns that management repeatedly treated...
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Hooters Rails Against Award in Arbitration It Required

Darrell VanDeusen
Darrell VanDeusen
04/04/2015
Employers without a union sometimes think it’s a good idea to consider implementing a policy that requires employees to arbitrate workplace claims rather than permit them to pursue remedies in court. The selling point, the story goes, is that it’s cheaper, faster and you don’t have to worry about a jury deciding the fate of the parties. Anyone who has gone through the arbitration process knows that along with the positives of arbitration –...
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Court Rules Morgue Worker Injured While Transporting Cadaver Can Proceed With Pregnancy Discrimination Claim.

Tiana LaSalle is a van driver for the New York City morgue. LaSalle sued her employer alleging a variety of discrimination claims. Her chief complaint, however, appeared to be that the City refused her request for an accommodation with regard to lifting heavy objects during her pregnancy. In November 2011 Plaintiff was pregnant, and she provided her boss with a doctor's note informing him of the pregnancy. In December 2011, LaSalle told her...
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Transgender Discrimination? He Said, She Said...

Clifford Geiger
Clifford Geiger
04/01/2015
On March 30, 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a complaint alleging that Southern Oklahoma State University (“University”) subjected Dr. Rachel Tudor, a professor who is transgender, to unlawful sex discrimination in violation of Title VII.  The University denies the allegations. Dr. Tudor is a male-to-female transgender professor who worked as a tenure track Assistant Professor in the University’s English Department beginning in...
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More on the Dangers of Unsupervised FLSA Settlements

Kollman & Saucier
Kollman & Saucier
03/26/2015
Suppose that you are an employer who has been found to have violated the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). In an attempt to curb future liability, you calculate the overtime owed to your employees who were mistakenly misclassified as exempt and print checks informing the employees that the amount of those checks represents “full payment . . . [for] wages earned, including minimum wage and overtime, up to the date of the check.” Can employees then...
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Supreme Court Clarifies Pregnancy Discrimination Act Claims in Young v. UPS

On March 26, 2015,  the Supreme Court announced its decision in Young v. UPS, setting forth a new standard for how employees may prove a claim of pregnancy discrimination under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA). Young v. United Parcel Service, Inc., 575 U.S. ____ (2015).  In Young,  the Court faced the issue of how to interpret the second clause of the PDA, which states: women affected by pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions...
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Merely Alleging Decision-Maker Bias Insufficient to State a Title VII Claim

Kollman & Saucier
Kollman & Saucier
03/20/2015
It’s a victory for Fourth Circuit employers (Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia) as the court clarifies that a complaint alleging employment discrimination must contain facts in support of each element of a claim in order to survive a motion to dismiss. McCleary-Evans v. Maryland Dept. of Transportation, No. 13-2488 (4th Cir. March 13, 2015). In this case, McCleary-Evans, an African-American woman, applied for two...
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Customer Rep With Social Anxiety Can Proceed to Trial on Disability Claims

Kollman & Saucier
Kollman & Saucier
03/18/2015
Can an employer lawfully fire a customer service employee whose social anxiety precludes her from interacting with customers? Not before exploring whether it can offer the employee a reasonable accommodation to perform her job duties, explained the Fourth Circuit in last week’s decision: Jacobs v. N.C. Administrative Office of the Courts, No. 13-2212 (4th Cir. Mar. 12, 2015). In this case, Christina Jacobs, who suffered from social anxiety...
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March Madness: Happy, Unproductive Employees?

Kollman & Saucier
Kollman & Saucier
03/13/2015
March 16 marks the beginning of the end of the NCAA college basketball season.  A global outplacement firm did some number crunching and concluded that March Madness could cost employers as much as $1.9 billion (yes billion) in productivity.  Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., the firm conducting this study, based its calculations on the number of workers likely to be caught up in madness; the estimated time spent considering and completing...
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Supreme Court Okays DOL's FLSA Interpretative Rule Change

The Supreme Court has confirmed that federal agencies, including the Department of Labor (DOL), are exempted from the Administrative Procedure Act's formal notice-and-comment rulemaking requirements when changing interpretative rules, as explained in its unanimous decision Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Ass'n, No. 13-1041, (U.S. March 9, 2015).  With this decision, the Supreme Court overruled the long established doctrine from Paralyzed Veterans of...
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