Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
The State Compensation Insurance Fund (known as State Fund), California’s largest workers’ comp insurer, has announced an average 16 percent rate cut for policies effective on or after Jan. 1, 2006. This is the fifth consecutive decrease since 2004, marking an average cumulative drop of 38 percent for State Fund policyholders. This latest State Fund […]
Because of the vulnerability of our systems to insiders, if someone gives two weeks’ notice before quitting, we usually have the person leave the premises right away. We handle the termination process in the next day or so under supervised conditions. My first question is, do we have to pay these people for the whole […]
Could I get some clarification on whether we owe overtime on predetermined bonuses? We pay a production bonus to our assembly workers when they hit certain production levels. The bonus is not a great amount of money, but it does seem to keep production levels up. Now we’ve heard that we should somehow be paying […]
I have a question about sexual harassment training. We have 35 full-time regular employees and usually about 40 or 50 temporaries. The temps work for months at a time, but we release them during slow periods. I think the law says you have to provide harassment training if you have 50 or more employees. Do we […]
I need some help with the administrative exemption as it relates to IT workers. We are a software consulting firm. Each consultant works pretty independently, managing and doing work on their own projects directly with clients. Their work is a mix of upper-level tasks (systems analysis, training, project management) and lower-level tasks (installing upgrades and […]
How do you recommend that we handle alcohol at our holiday party? We do want to serve alcohol, but we want to limit consumption in some way.
We routinely do background checks on our final candidates for employment. Now we’ve got a finalist that we all really like, but the background check revealed a problem credit history. The job doesn’t involve money, but we’re wondering what the credit history might reveal about this person’s character. I want to ask the candidate about […]
When our employees go on leave, such as FMLA leave, we adjust their appraisal dates to reflect the leave time. For example, if they take 3 months of leave, they get their appraisal at the 15-month point rather than the usual 12 months. Now some of them are saying that the FMLA says that leave […]
I have a question about determining the exempt or nonexempt status of our lowest-level managers. We think they are exempt, but we’ve read about some pretty expensive lawsuits and want to avoid that. We classify these employees as exempt, and they seem happy enough with that designation. Most of them are eager to move up […]
A new department of Labor opinion letter sheds light on when an employee does—and doesn’t—have the right to FMLA leave when adopting a child or receiving a child for foster care. We’ll explain the rules and point out some key differences in this area between the FMLA and the California Family Rights Act (CFRA). FMLA […]