Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
There are dozens of details to take care of in the day-to-day operation of your department and your company. We give you case studies, news updates, best practices and training tips that keep your organization fully in compliance with ever-changing employment law, and you fully aware of emerging HR trends.
According to the results of a new poll by Accountemps, most employees get distracted and are less productive during the holiday season. The poll included responses from HR, finance, and marketing executives at the country’s 1,000 largest companies. Forty-four percent of executives polled said their employees are less productive the week before a major holiday, […]
Computech, Inc., a Michigan-based firm that places computer professionals at workplaces throughout the U.S., has agreed to pay $2,250,000 in back wages and a $400,000 fine to settle charges levied by the Department of Labor that the company violated immigration law. The settlement proceeds will be shared by 232 computer professionals.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Several employee groups—firefighters, sheriffs, police officers, guards, and forest rangers—filed class action suits against their public-sector employers in California, charging that they weren’t fully compensated for the costs of purchasing, replacing, cleaning, and maintaining required work uniforms, in violation of Labor Code Section 2802. This provision requires an employer to reimburse employees for all necessary […]
It’s been almost a year since the California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE) proposed a new rule to add flexibility for employers and employees to California’s meal period requirements. The rule, which has gone through several versions, still isn’t final.