Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
In a divided 4-3 ruling, the California Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional state laws limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples.1 The case arose out of San Francisco’s move, back in 2004, to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples. The decision was immediately challenged, and the California Supreme Court ruled then that the marriages were […]
Suppose you have an employee who requests medical leave because she has a medical condition that, she claims, interferes with her ability to do her job. In the course of determining whether this time off qualifies as protected family and medical leave, you discover that she is continuing to work for another employer, performing similar […]
An increasing number of our employees are registering with domestic partners. Can an employee take kin care leave to spend time with his or her domestic partner?— Stephen D., HR Manager in Walnut Creek
We fired an employee, thinking he was “at will,” but now he claims we made an oral promise that he could be fired only for cause. We’ll fight this one in court, but how do we keep from having misunderstandings like these? —Martin B., HR Manager in San Francisco
Many of our employees are commercial truck drivers whose hours are regulated under CPUC and DOT rules. Do we need to provide meal breaks or make sure that these employees take meal breaks? CPUC and DOT rules regulate the number of hours that a driver can work per day, but are we still bound by […]
Our healthcare premiums have gone through the roof (whose haven’t?), and management is putting pressure on me to get the costs down. They think we can have an impact by establishing health criteria to screen out applicants who will be likely to have high health bills, e.g., smokers, those who are overweight and/or have high […]
In an important new ruling, the California Supreme Court has approved an employer’s practice of paying increased salaries and commissions to cover employees’ mileage expenses. At issue was Labor Code Section 2802, which requires employers to indemnify employees for necessary expenditures they incur as a result of the job. The employees here had argued that […]