Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
Evaluating sexual harassment claims almost always requires weighing conflicting evidence and making credibility determinations. In such situations, whoever is evaluating the claim—whether a court or an HR manager—must thoroughly examine all relevant evidence to determine whether the allegedly harassing conduct occurred and whether the conduct constitutes actual harassment because of sex or something else. Those […]
The 6th Circuit recently focused on comments made by an employee’s former supervisor shortly before her termination, including ageist name-calling and comments about her retirement. The court held she produced sufficient evidence of discrimination to bring her case to trial.
More than a year ago, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) released its proposal for improving schools’ responses to sexual harassment and sexual assaults.
A recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit—which covers Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee—highlights that an employer can be sued for violating the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) based on statements by managerial employees that reflect a bias against taking leave for military service, even though the […]
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits employers from discriminating against employees because of their disabilities. A covered disability is a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits a major life activity. That protection also extends to employees who are simply “regarded as” having a disability.
Countless formal and informal studies show that most employees retain at least some company data when they leave a job. The reasons vary from the benign (such as when an employee inadvertently keeps a work flash drive) to the more malicious (such as in the case of an employee’s deliberate theft of company trade secrets […]
In a recent case, Velez v. Comm’r, the U.S. Tax Court ruled that travel logs that were re-constructed years after the fact were not adequate to substantiate business-related miles as required by Section 274(d) of the Internal Revenue Code.
To tell stories successfully, we need to understand a little about why stories connect and a lot about how to build that connection through listening and storytelling.
A federal appeals court vacated a judgment totaling more than $16 million against a health plan administrator for its actions in attempting to recoup overpayments to an out-of-network hospital. The case is Conn. Gen’l Life Ins. Co. v. Humble Surgical Hosp., LLC, 878 F.3d 478 (5th Cir., Dec. 19, 2017).
HR professionals are all too familiar with the McDonnell-Douglas burden-shifting standard for establishing discrimination from circumstantial evidence. Under the standard, an employee presents a prima facie (minimally sufficient) case that he belongs to a protected class and suffered an adverse action. The employer then presents a legitimate nondiscriminatory reason for its action, and he in […]