When you file a wrongful termination lawsuit, it is a common practice for the defense attorneys, who represent your former employer, to look you up on the various social media websites, including Facebook, Twitter, and Linked In, among others. The are several reasons why they do this. First, they want…
Workers at businesses as small as 20 employees may soon snag certain perks after Tuesday night’s final vote on an amendment to San Francisco’s family-friendly workplace law. The city-county’s Family Friendly Workplace Ordinance – sponsored by eight of 11 supervisors last July – passed on the second reading and was…
Although this sounds counter-intuitive, equal treatment of all employees can be discriminatory and in violation of disability and other laws. The seminal case on this issues is US Airways, Inc. v Barnett (2002), decided by the US Supreme Court. In that case, the high court considered whether leave and other…
The main test of an employment relationship is whether the person to whom service is rendered has the right to control the manner and means of accomplishing the result desired. S.G. Borello & Sons, Inc. v Dept. of Industrial Relations (1989). The process of distinguishing employees from independent contractors is…
In a recent Forbes article, a Florida attorney Donna Ballman discusses the employers’ favorite sneaky ways of getting rid of older employees, which are described below. This very much applies to California and the checklist below can be a good start for any older employee who suspects that he is…
As much as I didn’t want to believe in this for a while after I started practicing employment law, my experience suggests over and over and in the vast majority of cases, when an employer issues a PIP (performance improvement plan) to an employee, this means that the employee will…
After Carie Charlesworth was terminated from her teaching job due to security concerns about her estranged husband, the California mother championed legislation to make sure no one would ever have the same experience of being fired. This past Friday, Charlesworth got her wish when Governor Brown signed a measure into…
In the recent decision of Natkin v California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, the appellate court clarified the term “wages” within the meaning of unemployment benefits rules. In that case, the claimant was an attorney who was laid off and who started his own law practice. On his application for unemployment…
The 14th Amended of the Constitution provides that no state shall deprive any person of… property without the due process. Before the state deprives someone of a protected property interest, the right to some kind of prior hearing must be provided. Regents of State Colleges v Roth (1972). Property interest…
The Pregnancy Disability Leave regulations provide that all employers must provide a leave of up to four months, as needed, for the periods of time an employee is actually disabled because of pregnancy even if an employe has a policy or practice that provides less than four months of leave…