Subscribe by RSS
Subscribe by EmailHR/Employment Blogosphere Update for December 12, 2005
Hopefully, this week’s update brings a little something for everyone, starting with this delightful winter photo entitled “A Snow Angel.”
This great pic attracted many comments on flickr, including: “It brings me right back to being a small child bundled up in a huge snowsuit and being incredibly excited about the snow” and “It brings me right back to being a drunken adult on ski holidays!”
The substance of the blog posts that follow range from harassment and retaliation law to safety to bullying to the job market. To make it fun and encourage you all to click over and scan through it all, I’ve tried to come up with brilliant headings, which I’ve then arranged in alphabetical order, thus hopelessly scrambling the actual topics.
All-Time Greatest Hits
About.com Human Resources lists its “Top 10 Most Popular Topics”
Bad Shape of Fast Food
New kids on the block Suits in the Workplace have a great post entitled “What’s On Your Sandwich?” about “Teenage workers at a popular sandwhich shop making genitalia-shaped meatballs and donuts and repeatedly showing them to older female employees.”
Yes, this kind of stuff happens — plenty — and here the court found it did not amount to actionable sexual harassment.
Gee, I’m surprised, I thought that was sure to be a million dollar case (he says sarcastically).
Seriously, the post makes clear why the plaintiff’s case was a definite loser despite the graphic facts.
Bullies Beware: Your Days May be Numbered
Drama, Conflict, Despair & Victory at Work writes about “bullying” at work and anti-bullying bills introduced in five states — California, Oklahoma, Hawaii, Washington and Oregon (none enacted yet), with reference to the Workplace Bullying and Trauma Institute.
Contingent Workforce Contingencies
Contingent Workforce links to a great article on “Working with the Contingent Workforce.”
The suggestions in the linked article for dealing with contingent workers are all excellent.
Contingent Workforce also links to an article reporting a study revealing “that many organizations could not answer critical questions about the use and impact of contingent labor on their organizations” and that “major opportunities exist for organizations looking to achieve greater returns on contingent labor by leveraging centralized contingent workforce management technology.”
Feeling Like Your Spouse and Kids Hardly Even Know You Any More?
The Blogging Boss writes very personally about “Balancing Work and Personal Life” in a post entitled “All Work and No Play Made Me an Absent Dad.”
Sound familiar, anyone?
Gazing in the Workplace Crystal Ball
The fantastically futuristically-oriented folks at The Future of Work Weblog (that’s meant as a compliment, folks) offer a variety of provocative questions, comments, and predictions: “Do You Have a Corporate Concierge?,” “Did You Hear the Ice Crack?” (containing 2006 predictions), “More Evidence of Changing Workforce Values,” and “Another vision of the future of work.”
Happy Blogiversary; Genetic Discrimination; Not Quite the Blind Leading the Blind, But . . .
Disability Law celebrates its one-year “blogiversary,” and links to articles on“Psycho-Legal Perspective on Genetic Discrimination” and “Blind Woman Fired as Head of State Blind Agency Awarded $3.4 Million.”
The latter case being kind of like unions comitting unfair labor practices against their own unionized employees, which has also happened on occasion.
Horrific Refinery Accident Investigation & Prosecution
Confined Space has a post on BP Amoco’s final Fatal Accident Investigation Report on the March 23 Texas City explosion that killed 15 workers and injured 170. The report recognized a number of critical systemic problems and lapses in BP’s safety “culture”; OSHA, which fined the company $21.3 million, will refer the case to Justice for criminal prosecution.
How Far is Too Far: Transfer as Retaliatory Adverse Employment Action
All Deliberate Speed covers a Sixth Circuit case holding that a transfer to another restaurant 120 miles away, in retaliation for complaining about sexual harassment, was an adverse employment action, although the pay, duties, and opportunities for promotion were the same in both jobs, negating the Ellerth/Faragher defense.
Look for Work and Slim Down this Holiday Season
The Oregonian’s At Work blog features some “Cool job search aids” and several posts on whether employers can/should regulate obesity.
Manufacturing Jobs and Workforce Mismatched
Drama, Conflict, Despair & Victory at Work cites a news story ironically reporting that “More than 80% of U.S. manufacturers say they cannot find enough qualified workers to meet customer demands, [and] . . . after losing 3.4 million factory jobs since 1998, employers are struggling to find enough high-skilled machinists, technicians and engineers to keep production lines humming.”
School is Definitely in Session With Employment Law 101
Professor Runkel, at Ross’ Employment Law Blog,
is off and running on his “Employment Law 101″ series. Already posted: Sources of employment law, Employment at-will, Collective bargaining agreements, Express contracts, and Employer handbooks.
Written for total beginners, these posts are also great review for those who think they already know plenty of employment law; you can read each in just a minute or two, and may find a thing or two you didn’t know or recall.
Trying Too Hard — or in the Wrong Way — to Improve Workplace Safety Record
Jottings By An Employer’s Lawyer reports on a million dollar verdict in which the jury apparently believed the employer’s safety-incentive program led to improper actions such as failure to properly report employee injuries and encouraging employees to not take off work because of injuries.
Were You Talking About A Horse or a Woman: a (Half) Million Dollar Question
Jottings also has a great post on a $450,00 settlement of a “sexual harassment” case based on use of the country idiom: “I ride them hard and put them away wet.”
If that was all the harassment evidence (good chance it wasn’t), this was not only overlawyering by the plaintiffs, but lousy lawyering by defense counsel, since the defendant would have been entitled to summary judgment.
Who is Gambling With Whose Money?
Working Life has two posts about troubles with defined benefit plans and employers’ shifting of investment risk to employees.
Some will respond “right on,” but I say the posts vastly oversimplify the issues, casting them in the same old tired us-against-them terms.
One accuses employers of essentially taking this position: “we no longer have any obligation to our workers, who make the company run and who deserve something specific and defined they can count on in retirement. Instead, we’re casting them into the casino atmosphere of the stock market.”
That analogy — casino to stock market — is outrageously off the mark. Take the odds on a decent mutual fund or bond fund and compare them to to those on a one-armed bandit. I’ve made my decision: I stay out of casinos and invest my retirement account like a good capitalist. Here’s how I’d complete the analogy for the SAT: casino is to stock market as spending is to saving.
Photo credit: Todd Klassy via flickr
For additional current information on labor & employment law, human resources, and other work-related topics, don’t forget to visit our “Recent Reading” page, a blog-within-a-blog.
Sphere: Related Content
Related Posts
If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment