Few stances have riled employers this summer more than the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) position that employee handbooks with language about at-will employment may violate the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). This position, which Kent Jones, an attorney with Nixon Peabody in San Francisco, characterized in an interview with SHRM Online as “a terrible stretch,” applies to all employers -- unionized or not.
The NLRB floated this theory in a pair of cases earlier this year at the Phoenix regional office.
With most laws, employers have less difficulty meeting the laws’ mandates as time goes by and they become more familiar with the requirements.
Not so with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), where lawsuits have multiplied as the law has increasingly fallen out of step with the modern workplace, according to Paul DeCamp, an attorney in the Washington, D.C., area office of Jackson Lewis, and former administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Wage and Hour Division.
“The ‘e’ in email stands for evidence,” particularly if the email is sarcastic, cautions Joe Beachboard, an attorney with Ogletree Deakins in Torrance, Calif.
Management attorneys interviewed by SHRM Online cited a host of sarcastic emails that could cause headaches for employers, including:
More Department of Labor (DOL) investigators are showing up unannounced at worksites and seeking to conduct immediate wage and hour investigations, according to Alfred Robinson Jr., acting administrator of the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division during President George W. Bush’s administration and now an attorney with Ogletree Deakins in Washington, D.C.