Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has released a new bulletin reminding employers that most workers under age 18 are prohibited from operating forklifts for nonagricultural operations. Plus, says OSHA, workers over 18 must be properly trained and certified before driving forklifts in the workplace. Note that Cal-OSHA also prohibits teens from driving […]
Latino employees at an Arizona community college were understandably offended when a professor broadly distributed e-mail messages exalting the “superiority of Western Civilization” and deriding the contributions of nonwhite immigrants and Native Americans. But did the professor’s messages create a racially hostile work environment? The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers Alaska, Arizona, […]
United Healthcare of Florida, Inc., has agreed to shell out $1.8 million in back pay and damages to resolve a same-sex harassment and retaliation lawsuit. The suit, filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), charged that a male regional vice president subjected a male senior account executive at the company’s Sunrise, Fla., office […]
President Clinton has signed into law new legislation, S. 2323, that excludes stock options from overtime pay. The bill takes effect on August 16, 2000, and is intended to counteract a recent Department of Labor opinion letter stating that stock option profits must be included in a nonexempt worker’s base pay when you calculate their […]
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has announced that it has reached a $20 million settlement of a race discrimination class action filed by the agency against national drug store chain Walgreens, which is based in Illinois. About 10,000 class members will share in the settlement proceeds.
An Orange County jury has awarded $1,350,000 to a real estate agent who claimed she was terminated because she complained she was being sexually harassed by a corporate vice president. And a Los Angeles jury has awarded $1,125,000 to a transit employee who claimed that she was sexually harassed by her supervisor and that the […]
Smaller businesses often don’t have the resources to create their own workplace policies, and often do without. The good news is that they no longer have to. A recent Daily Advisor article talked about the problems businesses have faced from the new practice of employee blogging. This writing of personal diaries on the Internet, for […]
Here’s a testament to the power of lower stop-loss attachment points. The City of Des Moines returned to self-funding health benefits for city employees, after an eight-year hiatus, the Des Moines Register reported today. The city council approved the move in a unanimous vote. The primary reason: Stop loss with far lower attachment point: previously […]
Yesterday’s Advisor offered tips for controlling surfing on company time; today we’ve got a list of key issues to consider when you write your Internet policy. Here, from BLR’s popular SmartPolicies, are particular topics to consider for your policy on Internet usage: Security. Are all files downloaded from the Internet scanned for viruses? Are hard […]