Top 6 Things You Should Know About Employment Law

Although written with corporate counsel in mind,these 6 important items about employment law seem to be relevant to any HR manager or even line manager, for that matter.

In what I think is a nicely written employment law article from law.com’s in-house counsel online website, a lawyer lists the six key employment laws, and most importantly, the key points in them.

Some of the employment laws he covers won’t surprise you terribly much — but others may. He includes: FMLA, Section 1981, and the PDA — do you know what the latter two refer to? OK, the details he includes of special importance for these and other laws are:

FMLA: beware of absences that may be covered under FMLA, even though the employee didn’t specifically request FMLA leave.
Section 1981: ethnicity discrimination is outlawed here. Note that the statute of limitations is four years. The are no caps on punitive damages!
PDA — Pregnancy discrimination Act — how familiar are you with that law? The writer points out that a lot more than just pregnancy is covered, including announcing one’s intention to conceive, as well as medical procedures to enable one to conceive. So, be careful here.
Summary judgment: According to the writer, summary judgments were once commonly used to toss employment law cases out before being heard by the court. But, he asserts, some recent Supreme Court decisions have sent the message to judges that too many cases are being dismissed via summary judgment and more need to be heard in court.
The writer also covers retaliation claims (well worth reading up on!) and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

Read more details on the six most important things you should know about employment law here. If you are not familiar with the points he writes about, you may consider doing some more reading.

Photo credit: LeoL30 via flickr