Audit, Compliance and Risk Blog

Employment Law: Identifying and Accommodating Disabled Employees

Posted by Jon Elliott on Thu, May 30, 2013

In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was enacted to protect the employment rights and opportunities of people with disabilities, and ensure their access to public services and accommodation. In September 2008, the ADA Amendments Act of 2008 repudiated several U.S. Supreme Court decisions interpreting ADA narrowly, and provided additional clarifications intended to ensure the broad availability of ADA’s protections. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) develops and applies employer standards, facilitates lawsuits by aggrieved employees, and can enforce ADA directly by filing its own lawsuits.

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Tags: Corporate Governance, Business & Legal, Employer Best Practices, Employee Rights, EEOC, NLRB, Disability benefits

Employment Law: How Mixed Can An Employer's Motives Be?

Posted by Jon Elliott on Thu, Feb 28, 2013

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s extended beyond the ballot box to enter most U.S. workplaces. Beginning with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, federal (and follow-on states’) laws seek to ensure employees' rights to equal treatment, by prohibiting employer discrimination against employees because of any characteristics that historically have been the basis for discrimination (dubbed “protected classes”). Federally protected classes presently include the following:

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Tags: Corporate Governance, Business & Legal, Employer Best Practices, Employee Rights, EEOC, NLRB

Employment Law: Are All Workplace Liaisons Dangerous Liaisons?

Posted by Jon Elliott on Mon, Jan 28, 2013

Everyone has relationships in the workplace. Many relationships are purely professional, while some add personal elements, and one or more may even be very personal. Anti-discrimination laws may impose scrutiny on any relationship where at least one person is a manager or supervisor, or the owner of a small enterprise. In the U.S. these include laws (including Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, and comparable state laws), regulations and enforcement guidelines (from by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and state equivalents), and court cases applying these standards. In Canada these include comparable human rights and occupational health and safety regimes.

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Tags: Corporate Governance, Business & Legal, Employer Best Practices, Employee Rights, Workplace violence, EEOC, NLRB

Employment Law: NLRB Revisits Work-Related Social Media Postings

Posted by Jon Elliott on Wed, Jan 09, 2013

Do you ever discuss work with co-worker friends on Facebook or other social media sites? Or, if you’re an employer, do you worry about what your employees may post about work on their Facebook pages—even when they do so from home after hours?

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Tags: Business & Legal, Employer Best Practices, Employee Rights, Internet, NLRB

Managing Employee Use of Social Media Without Breaking Employment Law

Posted by Jon Elliott on Wed, Oct 24, 2012

Is your organization one of the many with policies restricting employees’ use of social and other electronic media? If so, you need to consider last month’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decision, finding that Costco’s policy violates the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). This decision is another recent example of a regulator’s interpretation of ambiguous employer policies in ways that protect employee rights by using the employer’s ambiguity against it – and reinforce that employment law best practices require clarity and narrow drafting.

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Tags: Employer Best Practices, Employee Rights, Internet, NLRB