The U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts recently received a filing from a potentially large group of Massachusetts residents who allege their personal and private information was exposed in a data...
Employment Law Letter
Q: We have an employee who had elective weight-loss surgery without complications and is off work for two weeks to recover. Does the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) apply? If an eligible employee requests FMLA leave...
Q: We have an employee who died, and we would like to continue paying his salary for the next two months to help his wife. How should we go about doing this? Should we pay her using a 1099 MISC form? Unfortunately, like...
Watch any local newscast anywhere in the United States, and there’s a recurring theme: the hardball nature of local politics. This intersects with the fact that social media is a given in our lives, and all sorts of...
The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi) recently gave a booster shot to the viability of certain tort claims in Texas. A tort claim is a civil wrong committed by one person...
Discovery is the process by which each side in a lawsuit gets to know, before a trial, the knowledge possessed by the other side. And, sometimes, this knowledge will be shaped and offered at a trial. A new Texas Supreme...
Texas law protects public employees who “blow the whistle” on their government employer. But over the last several years, the Texas Supreme Court has interpreted the statute to limit its reach, remove its remedies, and...
Q For nonexempt, hourly employees who don’t have access to the time clock during the day (they are delivery drivers), how should we handle their meal breaks? Can we automatically deduct 30 minutes from their hours? There...
Interest continues to grow in programs that allow workers to access at least part of their pay ahead of their regular payday. Surveys consistently show that on-demand pay—often called earned wage access (EWA)—is a...
Employers have long used employee monitoring techniques to understand what workers do all day. Reasons for monitoring run the gamut from keeping an eye out for thieves and slackers to discovering ways to improve...
Ordinarily, employees are to be paid whenever they reach the end of employment. But for a temporary services employee, how are they told of that ending? And does that occur at the end of every assignment? A specific...
After an Orange County nightclub employee complained she was owed unpaid wages, her boss fired her, ordered her to leave and never to return, and threatened to report her to immigration authorities. The California...
The timing of settlement agreements has always been tricky business. You have to provide some time to consider it, a length sometimes set by statute at 21 or 45 days. But you also can’t have it signed too early and run...
Religion holds a special place among state and federal constitutional rights, and nowhere do religious rights hold more strongly than in the right to hire and fire ministerial employees. Employment decisions regarding...
An employee of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center didn’t want to get a flu vaccine and obtained a physician’s certification that exempted her from the requirement. Her employer’s internal exemption review committee denied the...