Posts Tagged ‘workplace’

Dark side of alternatives to incarceration: return of convict leasing

Rehab program sent men from drug courts in Oklahoma and elsewhere to chicken plant as unpaid labor [Amy Julia Harris and Shoshana Walter, Center for Investigative Reporting] More: Digital History/University of Houston on history of convict leasing (“In 1883, about 10 percent of Alabama’s total revenue was derived from convict leasing.”); Ida B. Wells, “The Convict Lease System” (“The Convict Lease System and Lynch Law are twin infamies which flourish hand in hand in many of the United States”); Frederick Douglass speech on convict lease system; U.S. Department of Justice peonage files 1901-1945.

Labor and employment roundup

Waivers of class actions against employers

The Supreme Court will resolve a circuit court split on whether employment agreements under which workers agree to “arbitrate disputes with their employers individually, rather than bringing class-action lawsuits collectively with their co-workers, are valid….In an unusual twist, the administration will face off against an independent agency of the federal government, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).” [Lawrence Hurley and Robert Iafolla, Reuters, earlier here, here, here, and arbitration generally] Monday was oral argument on the trio of Murphy Oil, Ernst & Young, and Epic Systems [Amy Howe, transcript]

After many a workplace enactment, is D.C. experiencing mandate fatigue?

Washington, D.C. “Council Chairman Phil Mendelson …has proposed a moratorium through the end of 2018 on [labor-law] bills that would negatively affect businesses.” About time, too: “While D.C., like Seattle and San Francisco, has the slack to absorb large-scale folly thanks to its role in hosting a booming sector of today’s economy, it is not entirely immune from nearby competition, a few miles away in Virginia and Maryland.” Let’s hope this snaps the recent streak of employer mandate legislation in cities and states that see themselves as progressive. I discuss in my new Cato post.

“Paid family leave figures are misleading”

Claims that only 12 percent of private-sector employees currently have access to employer-paid family leave don’t “match well with real-life experience or casual observation” or with data from nationally representative surveys, which find that more than half of employed mothers were offered paid maternity leave. Turns out that the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics uses tricky, and underinclusive, definitions. “As a result, BLS figures seem to grossly underestimate paid family leave availability. BLS methods penalize employers that provide flexible benefits, by pretending their benefits don’t exist.” [Vanessa Brown Calder, Cato]

“Macron Takes On France’s Labor Code, 100 Years in the Making”

“For now, the labor code is so complex, and violating it is so risky, that many French employers keep it in a separate room and speak of it with awe. Only specialists, on their staff or outside it, are allowed to consult the oracle, they say…. The Macron changes would help employers set the rules on hiring and firing, ignore the crippling restraints in the code that discourage taking on new workers, and limit unions’ ability to get in the way. Instead, individual agreements would be negotiated at the company or industry level between bosses and workers.” [Adam Nossiter, New York Times]

Labor and employment roundup

Right to curse out one’s boss on Facebook

“It’s been two years since the NLRB determined that section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act protected an employee’s profanity laced Facebook rant simply because he ended it with a pro union message. I held out hope that the court of appeals would see the folly in the decision and send a clear message to employees and employers that such misconduct remains a terminable offense. NLRB v. Pier Sixty (2nd Cir. 4/21/17) dashed that hope.” [Jon Hyman] More: Nixon Peabody, Eric Goldman.

NYC bans salary history inquiries

New York City has become the latest jurisdiction to ban asking about levels of current and past salary — an obviously rational and business-related inquiry in many cases — in hopes that maybe somehow the result will be to level female applicants’ salary offerings up (and not anyone’s down, of course.) “Nor will employers be able to search public records to discover a candidate’s payment history. (How that is enforced remains to be seen.)” [William D. Cohan, New York Times]

Employee caught vacationing while on medical leave can sue over firing

Jon Hyman on the Eleventh Circuit case of Jones v. Gulf Coast Health Care:

Suppose you have an employee who takes FMLA leave for rotator-cuff surgery. Let’s say during said FMLA leave, you discover that the employee is vacationing on a Caribbean island. And, further suppose that you discover this employee’s island vacay via his own public Facebook posts, which included photos of him on the beach, posing by a boat wreck, and in the ocean. Or, more accurately the employee’s co-workers saw the photos and ratted him out to management.

So, what do you do?

Fire the employee for abusing and/or misusing FMLA leave by engaging in activities (verified by pictures posted on his Facebook page) that demonstrated his ability to return to work earlier than the end of the FMLA leave.

Tread lightly, however, before making that decision, for in Jones v. Gulf Coast Health Care, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that based on these same facts, Rodney Jones was entitled to a jury trial on his FMLA retaliation claim….

Full story here.