Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Labor and employment roundup

  • Failure to accommodate employee’s religious belief forbidding hair-cutting results in $27K payout by Taco Bell operator [EEOC, North Carolina]
  • There’s a reason they call it Government Motors: nonunion GM assembly workers get shaft [Fountain]
  • Mayor Bloomberg refreshingly sane on “living wage,” though not alas rent control [Heather Mac Donald, Secular Right]
  • “The cost of labor isn’t the main problem, it’s the rigidities,” says French CEO [Bloomberg]
  • Maryland governor signs bill softening “workplace fraud” law that bedevils firms that use independent contractors [H.B. 1364, earlier]
  • Watch out for ghastly, mislabeled “Paycheck Fairness Act,” they’re trying to bring it back [Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Examiner, earlier]
  • “The most infuriating part of this is that it takes five years of litigation to fire a badly behaved police officer” [Josh Barro, Masnick/TechDirt, on cop’s harassment of skateboarder; Baltimore Sun (police union calls officer’s firing “outrageous.”)]

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4 Comments

  • The solution to the paycheck fairness act is simple: Don’t hire any women.

    As I understand it, the law generally exempts companies of 5 and fewer employees from many “equal opportunity” provisions (to allow for family businesses). Simply slice your company up into 5-employee units, each its own LLC.

    Or use a “job shop” to actually employ your personnel and rent your employees.

    Whatever businesses figure out, it will make things worse for anyone who is the least bit “special” to get a job.

    • By Robert

  • Whatever businesses figure out, it will make things worse for anyone who is the least bit “special” to get a job.

    Yep. Beware of unintended consequences.

    • By Mannie

  • It is not at all clear that, after all the appeals are exhausted, the Baltimore Chief of Police’s decision will stand.

    Police superintendents in Quincy Massachusetts have been trying for five years to dismiss a bully who likes to pick fights and then write tickets against those associated with those he picks fights with.

    http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/quincy/2011/10/quincy_officer_put_on_paid_adm.html
    http://policecrimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2045
    http://www.patriotledger.com/topstories/x515663436/Upcoming-hearing-could-lead-to-firing-of-Quincy-s-Robocop

  • It is unclear from the Taco Bell story whether the plaintiff was willing to wear a hair net.