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Employment Law

Don’t wait for disabled to ask: Accommodation is two-way street

08/01/2002
Ray Birton, a cart gatherer and stockman at a Missouri Wal-Mart, occasionally forgot instructions and didn’t clock in and out correctly, resulting in paycheck errors. Birton’s mother gave his manager …

Tear down accommodation hurdles; don’t make worker formally apply

08/01/2002
When Howard Shapiro, a 15-year city employee, became disabled in a work accident, he couldn’t continue his paramedic job. So he made repeated requests for accommodations and identified several vacant positions …

Preach secular management: Train supervisors to shun religious bias

08/01/2002
When a city-run youth program hired Cheryl Campos as a counselor, it promised her a $10,000 bonus for support-group work as well as a promotion to assistant director within six months. …

Draw line on harassing behavior, even against top company execs

08/01/2002
Over four months, a female co-worker slipped nearly a dozen sexually explicit pamphlets into the office mailbox of a company vice president, including one titled “Great Sex for Men over 50” …

Workers’ comp can cover on-the-job fights

08/01/2002
Robert LeeGrand, an African-American brick mason’s assistant, got mad when a co-worker criticized his work and made a racist remark. When LeeGrand confronted him, the co-worker threw bricks, which caused LeeGrand …

Employees have zero privacy claim on e-mail

08/01/2002
Two insurance workers sued, claiming privacy rights, after they were fired for forwarding sexually explicit e-mails. The company had a clear policy that banned defamatory, abusive, obscene or threatening messages. The …

Expect new rules on who’s exempt; possible changes to comp-time law

08/01/2002
The U.S. Labor Department says it will rewrite the Fair Labor Standards Act’s (FLSA) white-collar exemption rules for administrative, executive, professional and outside salespeople. Reason: Since those rules were drafted, some …

High court: Weingarten rights stand; state family leave case on docket

08/01/2002
It’s official: Employees have the right, even in nonunion workplaces, to bring a co-worker as a witness to an investigative meeting that could result in discipline. Nonunion employees won …

To beat the union heat, avoid 7 deadly management sins

08/01/2002
Why do some employers manage to operate their company in a union-free environment, while others in the same industry and city have a unionized work force? The reasons fit into …

Payroll records: Fine-tune exempt, nonexempt timekeeping

08/01/2002
THE LAW. Federal wage-and-hour laws don’t require you to have a time clock, but they do require you to have a reliable system to keep track of employees’ hours and pay …