Mark this beastly religious accommodation case for the employer

Last Monday, I wrote about a jury verdict against an employer that refused to make accommodation for an employee who objected to the use of the company’s time-keeping hand scanner for religious reasons. In response, one reader commented:

Seems to me that the law should require some sort of reasonableness requirement on the plaintiff. There’s no reason we should have to accommodate every ridiculous whack-a-doodle demand…. “The Mark of the Beast”? Seriously??? We should not have to cater to such nutjobs, and it makes a mockery of our legal/political/economic system to have to do so.

Well, captain_quirk, this one’s for you.

Last week, the 6th Circuit, in Yeager v. FirstEnergy Generation Corp., held that an employer does not have to accommodate an employee’s religious beliefs if those religious beliefs conflict with a requirement of federal law.

When the plaintiff, Donald Yeager, turned 18, he disavowed his social security number. As a Fundamentalist Christian, he believed that being identified by any number, including the federally mandated social security number, was having the “Mark of the Beast.” (Amazingly, Yeager is not alone in this thinking.) FirstEnergy refused to hire Yeager because he would not provide his social security number. Yeager sued, and lost.

Every circuit to consider the issue has [held] that Title VII does not require an employer to reasonably accommodate an employee’s religious beliefs if such accommodation would violate a federal statute. Some courts have [held] that a statutory obligation is not an “employment requirement,” while others have held … that violating a federal statute would impose an “undue hardship.” These dual rationales arrive at the same, sensible conclusion: “[A]n employer is not liable under Title VII when accommodating an employee’s religious beliefs would require the employer to violate federal … law.”

The Internal Revenue Code requires employers such as FirstEnergy to collect and provide the social security numbers of their employees. In this case … FirstEnergy’s collection of Yeager’s social security number is a “requirement imposed by law” and therefore not an “employment requirement.”

Despite this highly sensible decision, I stand by my conclusion from last week’s discussion—much more often than not, requests for accommodations are not the demarcation on a battleground, but the call for a middle ground … unless the request asks you to violate a federal law, in which case all bets are off.

WIRTW #353 (the “sphere of influence” edition)

Earlier this week, Moodvise published its list of the The 100 Most Influential People in HR and Recruiting on Twitter. I clocked in at a respectable #83. If you are new to Twitter, or just looking for a good list of folks to follow for your 140-character HR nuggets, you should check on Moodvise’s top 100.

Here’s the rest of what I read this week:

Discrimination

• End tenure as of age 70… — via Walter Olson’s Overlawyered
• For the defense: It’s getting complicated — via Michigan Employment Law Connection
• McDonald's Corporation Sued In Employment Discrimination Case — via Overtime Lawyer Blog
• Court Holds Employer Who Fired Employee For Making Death Threats May Have Violated ADA — via The Employment Brief
• Two big sexual harassment cases: where the employers went wrong — via Robin Shea’s Employment & Labor Insider
• McDonald’s Wrongful Termination Lawsuit to Test NLRB Decision — via WSJ.com Law Blog

Social Media & Workplace Technology

• Hack to the Future: Eleven Cyber Risk Developments Watch in 2015 — via The D & O Diary
• Data Security and Cyberthreat Trends for 2015 — via The SHRM Blog
• OK to monitor email without consent? — via Business Management Daily

HR & Employee Relations

• If You Run Credit Checks on Your Job Candidates, Now Would Be A Good Time To Panic — via Evil HR Lady, Suzanne Lucas
• S’now Joke: You are Fired for “Bad Weather” — via Workplace Prof Blog
• Miles on Employee Handbooks — via Phil Miles’s Lawffice Space
• How should your office handle snow days? — via Ask a Manager
• Handling Employee Theft — via HR Examiner with John Sumser
• Do I Have To Respond To A Complaint About “Deflated Balls” — via Evil Skippy at Work
• Playing “I-Spy” in the NFL Deflate-Gate Is No Different than the Workplace — via Sherman Law Corporation
• A Working from Home Experiment Shows High Performers Like It Better — via Harvard Business Review

Wage & Hour

• BLIZZARD! Wage and Hour Reminders for Employers on Winter Storm — via Dan Schwartz’s Connecticut Employment Law Blog
• FACT OR FICTION: Snow + Office Closed = FMLA Day — via Eric Meyer’s Employer Handbook Blog
• Unpaid Internship Showdown at the Second Circuit — via The Wage and Hour Litigation Blog
• FLSA Collective Action Certified By NJ Federal Court: Another Dangerous “Electronic” Class Action — via Wage & Hour - Development & Highlights
• Employers Cannot Rely on Timekeeping Policies as a Defense to FLSA Claims — via HR Defense Blog
• Eleventh Circuit Explains That Employer Knowledge of Work Renders It Compensable — via Wage and Hour Law Update

Labor Relations

• Despite Government Efforts, Union Density Slips Further — via LaborPains.org
• Labor board readies flurry of decisions — via The Hill
• Ithaca Adjunct Faculty Begin Organizing Effort — via Labor Relations Today
• NLRB’s Budget Increases as Workload Decreases — via Matt Austin Labor Law
• What is a “Right to Work” law? — via Texas Employment Law Blog
• Union Membership Declines In 2014 — via Labor Relations Today
• NLRB: Employers may terminate employees for insubordinate social media messages — via Technology for HR

Help EmployeeScreenIQ with its 6th annual Employment Background Screening Survey

Every now again I get to do something nice for people I like. Today is one of those days. EmployeeScreenIQ is conducting its 6th annual Employment Background Screening Survey.

According to the company:

In its 2015 survey, EmployeeScreenIQ again sets out to capture the various influences on employers' hiring practices and how they respond when adverse information is revealed. What type of criminal history or resume discrepancy is egregious enough to disqualify a job candidate? How are employers handling job applicants when red flags arise? The threat of lawsuits over discriminatory hiring practices, complex and confusing "ban the box" laws, resume distortion and social media overreach are among the serious challenges that continue to vex the HR community when conducting employment background checks.

All participants will receive a copy of the published results, along with an entry for a $250 Amazon gift card (not that anyone is bribing you).

The survey is available here.

Given the proliferation of FCRA class action lawsuits, along with EEOC’s stepped-up enforcement against the use of criminal histories in hiring, this survey is well worth your time.

Jury verdict teaches that “open door” policies must still comply with EEO laws

There exists an inherent tension  between open-door and other self-reporting policies and the EEO laws.

Consider, for example, a recent $100,000+ jury verdict against a trucking company for disability discrimination. The company maintained a written “Open Door” policy, and an unwritten policy that prohibited any driver who self-reported alcohol abuse from ever returning to driving. The EEOC sued after an employee who availed himself of the Open Door policy to self-report an alcohol addiction was banned from any future driving for the company. Even though the company offered the driver a part-time dock position as an accommodation, the EEOC successfully argued that the employer failed to “make an individualized determination as to whether the driver could return to driving and provide a reasonable accommodation of leave to its drivers for them to obtain treatment,” and that “to maintain a blanket policy that any driver who self-reports alcohol abuse could never return to driving—with no individualized assessment to determine if the driver could safely be returned to driving—violates the ADA.”

Employees need to be able to engage in protected activity without any retribution or other negative consequences. In this case, the employer learned of a disability and failed to engage in the interactive process for a reasonable accommodation. In others, employers might retaliate against an employee who uses an open-door policy to complaint about discrimination or harassment.

Open-door policies are laudable. They foster the communication that is necessary between employees and management necessary for a healthy (and hopefully union free) work environment. With that openness, however, comes responsibility—the responsibility to learn information without retaliating. Employees need to train management so that they know what to do with protected information once they learn it, and how to act without violating any of our EEO laws. Without this training, employers are setting up their open-door policies and programs for a litigation fail.

The full press release about this jury verdict is available here.

The FMLA has eligibility limits (unless you tell your employees otherwise)

The FMLA does not provide leave benefits to all employees of all employers. First and foremost, it only covers employers with 50 or more employees. And, only a subset of employees of a covered employer is eligible for FMLA leave.

An employee is eligible for FMLA leave from a covered employer if the employee—

1. was employed by the employer for at least 12 non-consecutive months;
2. worked 1,250 hours during the 12-month period preceding the start of the requested leave; and
3. works at a location where the employer employs 50 or more employees within a 75-mile radius.

Employees who fails to meet any one of these criteria are not eligible for FMLA leave … unless the employer tells them otherwise.

In Tilley v. Kalamazoo County Road Commission (6th Cir. 1/26/15) [pdf], the employer maintained the following FMLA policy:

Employees covered under the Family and Medical Leave Act are full-time employees who have worked for the Road Commission and accumulated 1,250 work hours in the previous 12 months.

The employer, however, denied Tilley’s request for FMLA leave because he did not work at a location that employed 50 or more employees within a 75-mile radius. Based on the employer’s unambiguous policy, however, the court concluded that the employer waived any ability to rely upon the 50-employee threshold.

This is an unambiguous and unqualified statement that Road Commission employees, like Tilley, who have logged 1,250 hours in the year before seeking FMLA leave are covered by the FMLA and are eligible to apply for FMLA benefits…. 

The Road Commission could have qualified its statement concerning employee eligibility by adding that its full-time employees would only be covered by the FMLA if they worked at, or within 75 miles of, a site at which the Road Commission employed at least 50 employees. That is precisely what other employers have done…. 

And we are unwilling to conclude as a matter of law that Tilley was unreasonable in relying on the Manual’s statement that employees in his position were eligible to apply for FMLA benefits. Simply put, a reasonable person in Tilley’s position could fairly have believed that he was protected by the FMLA.

Bottom line? Courts will hold you to your word if you mis-represent FMLA eligibility to an otherwise ineligible employee. If you, as an employer, do not want to go beyond the FMLA’s baseline requirements, you need to check, and then double-check, your leave policies, to make sure you are not promising your way into more coverage than intended.

Should it matter if your employee thinks hand scanners are tools of Satan?

If you’re a long time reader of my blog, you might recall a story I shared a few years ago about a co-worker at one of my high-school jobs, who held some interesting opinions about Lee Iacocca, Satan, and the end of the world. At the time, I made a point about taking the path of least resistance with reasonable accommodations.

Apparently, Consol Energy is not a blog subscriber.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette brings us the story of Beverly Butcher Jr., an employee at its Robinson Run, West Virginia, mine, and an Evangelical Christian, who refused to use the company’s hand scanner to clock in an clock out, because he believed it would imprint him with the “mark of the beast.” Instead of working with Butcher, or providing him an alternative way to track his time, the company mandated his use of the hand scanner. He quit, the EEOC sued on his behalf, and, last week, a federal jury ruled in his favor, awarding him $150,000 in compensatory damages on his religious discrimination claim. Later this year the court will rule on back pay, front pay, punitive damages, and attorneys’ fees.

Whether or not an employee is entitled to a religious accommodation is not dependent upon whether or not you happen to agree with the employee’s religious beliefs. Instead, it hinges solely on whether the beliefs are sincerely held, and, if so, whether you can provide the accommodation without it imposing an undue hardship. While this employer could make a credible undue-hardship argument based on the need for accurate time tracking, and uniformity among employees, it it worth it. Denying the requested accommodation—not using the hand scanner and tracking time in and time out with a different tool—is not worth the headache and associated costs of a federal lawsuit (verdict included).

Requests for accommodations (whether for religious or disability purposes) are not the demarcation on a battleground. Instead, they are a call for a middle ground. Employers need to recognize this truth, and starting wars that simply are not worth fighting.

WIRTW #352 (the “rock hard” edition)

In my never-ending quest to be an employment lawyer and manager for my 8-year-old daughter’s burgeoning rock career, I bring you 4:50 of melt your face off rock and roll from last weekend’s School of Rock Joan Jett show. That’s Norah killing the lead guitar on “You Got A Problem,” and closing the show with “Bad Reputation.”

My personal favorite part—Norah’s demure, “Thank you very much / Have a good afternoon” after screaming about her bad reputation. Who said polite manners and rock ‘n’ roll don’t mix?

You can check out the repeat performance tomorrow, January 24, at 1 pm at the Music Box Supper Club.

Here’s what I read this week:

Discrimination

• New Retaliation Standard of Proof Shows Its Teeth — via Dan Schwartz’s Connecticut Employment Law Blog
• Keeping Up With the EEOC in 2015 — via Law.com - In-House Counsel
• Donuts & Pregnancy Rumors: A Cautionary Tale — via All in a Day’s Work
• A hospital may have broken the law by NOT hiring a convicted meth dealer — via Eric Meyer’s The Employer Handbook Blog
• Does sex discrimination protection extend to everyone? — via Mike Haberman’s Omega HR Solutions
• Telecommuting Discrimination — via hr bartender
• EEOC’s Arguments to Supreme Court Antithesis of Transparency and Open Government — via WinWinHR
• Is It Time To Make Fat People A Protected Class?​ — via Above the Law
• Five errors that make defending an employment lawsuit harder — via California Employment Law Report
• You’ve gotta be kidding. THIS is retaliation? — via Robin Shea’s Employment & Labor Insider

Social Media & Workplace Technology

• Why Companies Are Doling Out Wearable Devices to Employees — via Next Blog
• Do We Need a “Right to Be Forgotten” in the U.S.? — via Technologist
• Glassdoor Matters Because ALL of Your Employees Are Now Used to Rating Things — via The HR Capitalist, Kris Dunn

HR & Employee Relations

• Should I Check With A Lawyer Before Firing Someone? — via Evil Skippy at Work
• Background Checks – Should We or Shouldn’t We? — via Genesis HR Solutions
• Background Checks: The Devil Is In The Detail — via fyiscreening.com
• 20 Things You Wish Your Coworkers Wouldn’t Do — via Evil HR Lady, Suzanne Lucas
• Debunking 4 Common PEO Myths — via GMS Blog

Wage & Hour

• Wage-Hour Litigation To Rise in 2015: So What Else Is New? — via Wage & Hour - Development & Highlights
• Judge Vacates Parts of USDOL Home-Care Regulation — via Wage and Hour Laws Blog
• Eleventh Circuit Explains That Employer Knowledge of Work Renders It Compensable — via Wage and Hour Law Update
• Should I let employees just leave a voicemail message when they’re going to be out sick? — via Ask a Manager
• Employer Requires Employee to Work During FMLA Leave. Ummmm, Is This a Problem? — via Jeff Nowak’s FMLA Insights

Labor Relations

• Technological change drives three new NLRB decisions — via Business Management Daily
• Newly Released Guidance from NLRB Regarding Social Media Policies — via Matt Austin Labor Law

Why performance reviews matter in employment litigation

According to Employment Law 360, a federal judge has indicated that he will likely deny the motion for summary judgment Deutsche Bank intends to file seeking the dismissal of a sex discrimination lawsuit brought by one of its former vice presidents.

The lawsuit alleges that bank “mommy-tracked” the plaintiff, a 14-year employee with a strong performance history, and ultimately fired her. Her lawyer argued to the court that her strong history of performance reviews demonstrates pretext in the bank’s decisions regarding her performance. In response to the bank’s counter-arguments about her performance (which included an argument that her positive reviews resulted from an “easy grader”), the judge responded, “It’s all sounding really fact-y to me.”

Folks, performance reviews matter. They not only matter in managing your employees during their employment, but they also matter in defending lawsuits about their employment. If you plan on terminating an employee on performance, you need to have the goods to back it up. What should you be doing before the termination? Checking the reviews to make sure the paper trail supports the poor-performer argument. If it doesn’t, you best have a solid explanation as to why. Otherwise, your termination will start to smell not only “fact-y”, but also possibly “pretext-y.” The last thing you want in a discrimination case is for your decision to have the scent of pretext.

New anonymous workplace app raises big workplace issue

Have you heard about Memo? It an iPhone app that allows individuals to post anonymous comments, both positive and negative, about their employers to a specific group page about the company. As you could imagine, it’s the negative posts that will get the lion’s share of attention.

Here’s what a typical company-bashing comment on Memo looks like.

According to Quartz.com, Memo has already “received two cease-and-desist letters, two companies have blocked emails from Memo hitting their servers, and three companies have written memos to employees about the app.”

I want to address the latter—companies that, via policy, fiat, or otherwise, try to stop their employees from using Memo.

As you should know, federal labor law gives employees the right to engage in protected, concerted activity—that is, discussions between or among employees about wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment. Employees’ discussions, for example, about an open-door policy, would be a textbook example of protected concerted activity.

Federal labor law prohibits employers from retaliating against employees for engaging in protected concerted activity. Retaliation isn’t Memo’s biggest risk because its posts are (supposedly) anonymous. However, federal labor law also prohibits employers from maintaining or enforcing policies that could chill employees’ right to speak about terms and conditions of employment.

Thus, if you think you can legislate Memo (or other similar apps) out of your workplace, you might want to think again. The NLRB will likely hold a very different opinion about the rights of your employees to talk about your company, anonymously or otherwise.

Old laws meet new technology: sexual harassment via social media

Last week, the EEOC held a public meeting on workplace harassment. The most interesting testimony was provided by Jane Kow, of HR Law Consultants, who spoke about the impact of harassment on the modern workplace. One of the key areas she covered was the intersection of workplace harassment and social media:

The ease and speed of posting or responding to the proliferation of messages and images on social media—sometimes by employees at the 11th hour, right before bed, in 140 characters or less, and oftentimes without aforethought—has spawned employee complaints of harassment, defamation, violation of a right to privacy and a host of other claims. None of this was even imaginable in 1964 when Title VII was enacted (or in 1991 when it was amended). But employers must now interpret an EEOC guidance that was written and cas es that were decided by courts in the old millennia to determine how to apply these rules to regulate conduct in the new workplace of the present and future, transformed by these technological advances. 

Employers are now grappling with how to lawfully regulate employees’ text messages, blogs, and social media activity in the face of potential complaints from co-workers about harassing comments posted or images shared publicly.  

What does this mean for your business. The workplace's boundaries no longer begin a 9 and stop at 5. Technology connects employees to each other 24/7. This added connectivity creates opportunities for greater employee engagement and stronger workplace communities. It also creates opportunities for bad actors to do bad things, like harassment. It's important for employers to keep in mind that agencies and courts will apply the same rules to Facebook harassment as they would to face-to-face harassment. If they aren't treating any differently, neither should you.

A few from the archives for MLK Day

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Race relations have been particularly scrutinized over the past few months, with Ferguson and its fall out around the country. Thus, it is more important than ever to pause and think about Dr. King, and the lessons of inclusion and respect to be learned from his life and untimely death.

In this regard, here is what I’ve had to say to mark this day over the past few years.

• Something Different for MLK Day
• What Dr. King fought for … and what he didn’t
• MLK Day calls for reflection about how far race relations have come, and how far we have left to go
• Some words to ponder on MLK Day

WIRTW #351 (the “conciliation” edition)

We’re supposed to assume complete good faith on the government’s part and complete bad faith on the part of employers?

Chief Justice John Roberts asked this question of Assistant Solicitor General Nicole Saharsky during oral argument earlier this week in Mach Mining v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a case that will test the limits of how far the EEOC has to go to try to conciliate a charge of discrimination prior to filing an enforcement action in court.

The oral argument did not go so well for the EEOC. Irin Carmon at MSNBC, Jess Bravin at the Wall Street Journal, and Julie Goldscheid at SCOTUSblog have the details.

Here’s the rest of what I read this week:

Discrimination

• Are punitive damages recoverable in a Title VII discrimination case? — via Employment Law Bits
• Fitness for Duty Release Did Not Undermine Legitimate Reasons for Termination — via Laconic Law Blog
• Year-Starting Stumbles: The EEOC’s Aggressive Tactics Shot Down Twice In The First Week Of 2015 — via EEOC Year-End Countdown
• Employer Fails to Provide Leave of Absence to Probationary Employee, Pays the Price — via Jeff Nowak’s FMLA Insights
• 7th Circuit Finds Employer That Included Employee's EEOC Complaint in SEC Filings Enough to Show Retaliation — via Wisconsin Employment & Labor Law Blog
• Recent 404(b) “Other Acts” Cases In Title VII Employment Context — via David Neel’s Cleveland Employment Law Blog

Social Media & Workplace Technology

• Should You Be Performing Facebook Background Checks? — via ERC Insights Blog
• Facebook at Work tackles office communication with familiar tools — via Engadget Mobile
• Lawsuits, Discovery, and the Right to Privacy In the Context of Social Media — via Molly DiBianca’s Delaware Employment Law Blog
• BYOD and Employee Habits—Employer Concerns — via HR Daily Advisor

HR & Employee Relations

• Is Your Organization Ready for Another Northeast Ohio Winter? — via ERC Blog
• Workers may be temporary, but OSHA is forever: clarifying employer duties — via HR Hero Line
• My Employee Jokes About Strangling Difficult Customers — via Evil Skippy at Work
• HR 101: To Background Check or NOT to Background Check — via TLNT
• 8 New Year's Resolutions for HR — via Next Blog
• Is Policy The Enemy of Trust? — via Next Blog

Wage & Hour

• Since You Asked: A Modest Wage & Hour Law Proposal — via Dan Schwartz’s Connecticut Employment Law Blog
• President Obama to push for paid sick leave for American workers — via Eric Meyer’s Employer Handbook Blog
• Converting employees into contractors? Prepare for expensive, protracted litigation — via Business Management Daily
• Make sure smartphones mean smart business: Beware of wage-hour hazards — via Technology for HR
• Workers Are Bad at Filling Out Timesheets, and It Costs Billions a Day — via Harvard Business Review
• Can My Boss Dock My Pay For Mistakes? — via Donna Ballman at AOL Jobs

Labor Relations

• Can Companies Fire Workers Who Blab About How Much Money the Boss Makes? — via Matt Austin Labor Law
• U.S. Chamber Files Suit to Block NLRB’s New Election Rule Which Would Speed Up Elections — via Wyatt Employment Law Report
• New Year, New Rules, New Union-Avoidance Strategies — via Employment Law Watch
• Want to Be Happy? Join a Union — via The New York Times

Why retaliation claims should keep you up at night

In early 2009, Aker Plant Services terminated the employment of Tommy Sharp as part of workforce reduction. When Sharp asked his supervisor why the company chose him, as opposed to his less experienced, less senior co-workers, the supervisor replied that the company decided to keep younger employees who could stay with the company longer. Sharp then sued for age discrimination.

While Sharp’s age discrimination lawsuit was pending, a staffing agency attempted to place him for a temporary position at Aker. The company, however, immediately rejected Sharp’s candidacy,  notifying the staffing agency, via email, as follows:

Yes, we do know Tom. He does acceptable work as a designer, but he violated a DuPont mandate on the use of electronic recording devices on company property when last employed here. There are combustible materials in the plant that can potentially be ignited by the use of cell phones, recorders, cameras, etc… [sic] DuPont maintains a zero-tolerance approach to safety violations on its property so, unfortunately, we will not be able to consider Mr. Sharp for this role.

Sharp then brought a second suit, this time for retaliation. The district court dismissed the retaliation claim, concluding that the 15-month gap between Sharp’s initial notification of an intent to sue for age discrimination and the email to the staffing agency severed any potential causal connection between the two events.

The 6th Circuit, however, in Sharp v. Aker Plant Services Group (6th Cir. 1/13/15) [pdf], disagreed:

Considering the evidence in the light most favorable to Sharp, one could reasonably infer that Aker declined to rehire Sharp in retaliation for his then-pending discrimination action. Yes, it was fifteen months later…. Aker terminated Sharp before he filed his age-discrimination lawsuit, and therefore could not retaliate against him in any manner until he returned seeking temporary employment a year and a half later. Evidence showing that an employer had no opportunity to retaliate sooner supports a finding of temporal proximity.

Retaliation are the most dangerous claims that employers face. This employer likely felt safe refusing Aker’s placement because of the 15-month gap. That time gap, however, was tempered by the fact that the company no longer employed Aker, and its next interaction with him was the claimed act of retaliation. When an employee engages in protected activity, you must treat that employee with added care, as any act that could dissuade an employee from engaging in protected activity could give rise to a retaliation claim.

Beware the pregnancy accommodation claim

On Monday I published my list of the five biggest issues employers need to watch and manage in 2015. I listed “pregnancy leave rights” as number five. In reality, though, that issue could easily have been number one.

Consider that earlier this week, USA Today told the story of a North Carolina nursing assistant, who claims that she was forced to resign from her job after her employer refused to provide light duty to accommodate the medical complications of her pregnancy. According to the story, “The nursing home regularly provided ‘light duty’ to workers unable to lift, Cole says in the complaint. On light duty, nurse assistants can feed and clean residents and assist with oxygen tubing and nebulizers, she added.

This issue is not going away. Charges filed with the EEOC alleging pregnancy discrimination have increased by nearly 50% over the past 15 years. Moreover, women comprise nearly half of the workforce, and 75% of them will become pregnant at some point. Couple those stats with the fact that 40% households with children have mothers who are either the sole or primary source of income for the family, and you can see why this issue is so critical to the American worker (and, consequently, the American employer).

Yet, this should be a non-issue for most employers. Just this past summer, the EEOC issued enforcement guidance that affirmed my long-held belief that employers may have to provide light duty for pregnant workers, and must provide the same accommodations to pregnant workers as to other workers with similarly disabling medical conditions. This rule will impose a light-duty obligation on most employers.

Ask yourself—

• Have I ever provided light duty to expedite the return-to-work of an employee with a work-comp claim?
• Have I ever provided light duty to an employee as an ADA reasonable accommodation?

If you answer “yes” to either of these questions (and most employers will), then you cannot deny the same light duty to a pregnant worker.

“Buyer’s regret” as an adverse employment action

Nearly a year ago, in Deleon v. City of Kalamazoo, the 6th Circuit decided that an employee could claim discrimination when he was “involuntarily” transferred into a position for which he had earlier voluntarily applied. 

At the time, I thought it was one of the worst decisions I had ever read.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court decline to review the Deleon case. Typically, these denials are unceremonious affairs, with nary a word other than “denied” pronounced. Justice Alito, however, apparently agreeing with my assessment of the 6th Circuit’s decision, took the rare occasion to draft a dissent to the denial (pdf here). This is what he wrote:

An old maxim warns: Be careful what you wish for; you might receive it. In the Sixth Circuit, however, employees need not be careful what they ask for because, if their request is granted and they encounter buyer’s regret, they can sue.

No termination is perfectly insured against a lawsuit. Some are more high risk than others (and those should be accompanied by an offer a severance package in exchange for a release of claims). Even the easiest decisions, however, carry some amount of risk. On any given day, any judge or jury could agree with the employee and decide against you. You job as an employer is to balance the risk of a lawsuit against the risk of keeping an employee employed and make a reasoned, informed decision about whether to retain, fire, or fire with a severance offer. And, please, don’t have buyer’s regret.

[Hat tip: Phil Miles’s Lawffice Space] 

Five for ’15: The legal issues that need to be on your radar

Personally, December is my favorite time of the year. I love the joy and togetherness of the holiday season. Professionally, however, I love January. After we’ve decked the halls and sung the last bars of Auld Lang Syne, companies get back to work, including the work of managing their most important asset—their employees.

Now that business is back in session, employers need to figure out the issues that will keep them up at night over the next 12 months. And that’s where I come in. My phone will start to ring as employers realize that they haven’t updated their handbook since the (first) Bush administration, of haven’t conducted harassment training since before Anita Hill made sexual harassment a household phrase.

What are the hot-button employment law issues that will keep your HR department busy over the next year? Let me offer five suggestions.

     1. Cyber-Security. No business is safe from the risk of a cyber-breach. The question of whether your business will suffer a breach is one of “when” and not “if.” Those looking to exploit your business and its information will attack your weakest point—your employees. A misplaced iPhone or laptop is a hacker’s key to your cyber-kingdom. Do your employees know what to do if their device is lost or stolen? Do they know to avoid unsecure Wi-Fi? Do they understand the risks associated with a loss of trade secrets or other confidential information? Are key employees locked down with confidentiality and non-competition agreements? Unless you can answer “yes” to each of these questions, you are taking a huge risk with your data. Be proactive in 2015 with your cyber-security by investing in prophylaxes to limit the risk of a breach. Creating a culture of security in your business will be the best money your company spends this year.

     2. Vaping. “Vape” was the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year for 2014. For the uninitiated, vaping is the practice of using e-cigarettes to deliver tobacco through a heating element to vaporize a liquid solution that includes a concentration of nicotine. Because these vaporizing devices do not contain tobacco, most state workplace smoking laws do not regulate them. Thus, it is up to individual employers to determine the pros and cons of e-cigarettes for their workplaces and to adopt a policy that reflects that position. Yet, laws that prohibit smoking in the workplace are a floor, not a ceiling. You are free to ban these devices in your workplace, and should consider doing so, as the associated health risks are undetermined.

     3. Same-sex relationships. Congress has been slow to amend Title VII to expressly prohibit LGBT discrimination. With the Republicans now controlling both houses of Congress, this trend is unlikely to change any time soon. It is offensive that, in 2015, it is still legal to discriminate against any class of people. Employers should not wait for Title VII expressly to include LGBT as a protected class. Instead, employers can, and should, do right by all of their employees by adopting progressive anti-discrimination policies that make it clear that they are employers are inclusion for all employees, even if Title VII, on its face, still permits discrimination against some.

     4. Overly active federal agencies. Social media. Wellness programs. Criminal background checks. These are just a few of the issues that the feds have on their radar. President Obama’s labor and employment legislative agenda may have been a big dud, but that has not stopped the EEOC, the NLRB, and the DOL from picking up the torch and running with it. Employers, be afraid.

     5. Pregnancy leave rights. In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide Young v. United Parcel Service, which will address the issue of whether, and in what circumstances, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act requires an employer that provides work accommodations to non-pregnant employees with medical limitations to provide similar accommodations to pregnant employees who are similar in their (in)ability to work. UPS, which had previously refused to provide these accommodations to pregnant workers, has already amended its policies to make light duty available to pregnant employees with lifting or other restrictions to the same extent such work is available to employees with on-the-job injuries. This policy change is consistent with EEOC guidance published on this issue last summer. Stay tuned, as this issue promises to help shape the national debate over work/life balance and working parents.

Happy 2015! Cheers to a litigation free year.

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This post originally appeared in the January 2015 issue of Workforce.

WIRTW #350 (the “bad reputation” edition)

Allow me to take off my law blogger hat for a moment, and switch to my concert promoter hat.

If you love live music and find yourself looking for something to do on January 18 at 3 pm, or January 24 at 1 pm, School of Rock Strongsville will be presenting The Music of Joan Jett, featuring my very own Norah Hyman on guitar and vocals.

Both shows are at The Music Box, 1148 Main Ave., on the west bank of Cleveland’s rejuvenating Flats (a venue worth checking out if you haven’t yet been there). And, best of all, both shows are free.

Here’s what I read over the past few weeks:

Discrimination

• Is It Harassment To Post Nutritional Information On A Co-Worker’s Chair? — via Evil Skippy at Work
• The need for actual medical evidence in disability cases — via EmployerLINC
• “Your Asperger’s got in the way of your ability to interact with your boss, and we are tired of it.” — via Eric Meyer’s Employer Handbook Blog
• Family Friendly Policies: Is Europe Ahead Of The US? — via Employment Discrimination Report
• Do the ADA and FMLA Provide Protections to LGBT’s in the Workplace? — via The Emplawyerologist
• Obesity as a Disability: A Comparative Look — via Workplace Prof Blog
• The EEOC issues you’ll want to keep an eye on in 2015 — via HR Morning

Social Media & Workplace Technology

• HR Technology Trends In The Workplace In 2015 — via Karen Higginbottom at Forbes
• Watch Your Back: The Growing Threat of FCRA Background Check Class Actions — via Labor & Employment Law Perspectives
• Facebook Threats Constitute Legitimate Grounds for Termination — via Molly DiBianca at Next Blog
• Employee Terminated For Ill-Advised Facebook Post Gets Unemployment Benefits — via Technology & Marketing Law
• Report: Email still trumps social media, smartphones for workers — via Ragan.com
• 10 Social Media Privacy New Year's Resolutions — via Shear on Social Media Law

HR & Employee Relations

• Three Times When You Should Call an Employment Lawyer — via Dan Schwartz’s Connecticut Employment Law Blog
• Is your company covered by the Affordable Care Act yet? — via Mike Haberman’s Omega HR Solutions
• Knowing When to Fire Someone — via Harvard Business Review
• 15 for ’15: Employment and labor resolutions for the new year — via Robin Shea’s Employment & Labor Insider
• Don’t Be That Guy: Holding Out on Employment Background Checks — via employeescreenIQ Blog
• The Employee Zone Of Privacy — via Ohio HR Law

Wage & Hour

• Exotic dancers agree to $2.3 million wage and hour settlement — via Employer Advocate
• A Simple Proposal to Amend the FLSA to Benefit Everyone - Yes, Everyone — via Wage and Hour Defense Blog
• Attorney Client Privilege No Defense! – Turnover of Client Communications on Exempt Status Ordered — via Wage & Hour - Development & Highlights
• Wage and Hour Collective Actions May Lead To Improved Workplace Conditions — via Overtime Lawyer Blog
• Labor Department Going After More Wage and Hour Laws Violations — via TLNT
• How Do I Calculate FMLA Leave Where My Employee's Work Schedule Varies From Week to Week? — via Jeff Nowak’s FMLA Insights

Labor Relations

• Decertification Infographic — via Labor Relations Institute
• NLRB Sued Over Quickie Election Rule — via The National Law Review

Is “wife swapping” a protected class?

Although we are only 8 days into 2015, Lowering the Bar brings us what might be the lawsuit of the year:

According to the complaint, the plaintiffs are “lifelong friends” and in the course of socializing, each of them fell in love with the other’s wife and the wives felt similarly.… The new living arrangements have been established; divorces are planned but have not yet been obtained. 

Although everyone involved is said to be perfectly happy with the situation, the plaintiffs allege that their employers were not, and “placed them both on unpaid administrative leave due to their co-habitation with a woman who is not their wife.” … Plaintiffs also allege they were told that if and when they returned to work, they would be demoted, and would have to “cease all contact” with the former co-habitors until such time as they obtained divorces.

The lawsuit—Coker v. Whittington [pdf]—is a constitutional civil rights action alleging that the discrimination is based on religion and violates the employees’ right to privacy and freedom of association.

Regardless of the legality of the termination (and I'm not convinced this employer did anything illegal), this lawsuit illustrates the pitfalls that face an employer that imposes its moral worldview on employees. An employer has no business firing employees because it disagrees with how they choose to live their private lives. Assuming that their private lives do not affect their job performance, it should not impact their employability. Next time you want to take a stand against an employee for how he or she chooses to live his or life outside of work, think again.

The employees who lunch don't need to be paid

Yesterday, the 6th upheld the dismissal of an FLSA collective action, in which a group of employees had alleged that their employer failed to pay them for time spent working during their lunch breaks.

Before we discuss how the employer won this case, I think it’s appropriate to have a quick refresher on meal and rest breaks under the FLSA.

Meal and rest periods are not required by any law. Neither federal law or Ohio law requires employers to provided employees with any breaks during the work day. Federal law, however, does provide for whether meal and rest breaks are counted as “hours worked.” This distinction is important. If time is counted as “hours worked,” it goes into the calculation of time worked during the work week for consideration of whether the employee has crossed the 40-hour threshold for overtime pay.

• Rest periods, which are considered breaks of 20 minutes or less, are counted as hours worked whether or not the break is paid. Rest breaks are customarily paid, and if they must be counted as work hours, they might as well be paid for. 
• A bona fide meal period, however, is not considered hours worked. To be a bona fide meal period the employee must be totally relieved of his or her work duties. According to the Department of Labor: “The employee is not relieved if he is required to perform any duties, whether active or inactive, while eating.”

What does it mean to be “totally relieved of one’s work duties?” The 6th Circuit falls in line with most of the federal courts in applying the “predominant benefit” test to determine whether an employee’s meal period is compensable. Under this test, the employee bears the burden to prove that the normally non-compensable meal period should be compensable because it is spent predominantly for the employer’s benefit. The key inquiry is whether the employee engaged in the performance of any substantial duties during the lunch break.

With this background in mind, let’s look at yesterday’s decision in Jones-Turner, et al. v. Yellow Enterprise Sys. [pdf].

The class involved a group of EMTs and dispatchers who claimed that they were not paid for time spent “working” during their lunch breaks. Yellow automatically designated a 30-minute slot during each 8.5-hour shift as an unpaid lunch break. EMTs in the field were not allotted a specific time period for lunch but were instructed to use down time between ambulance runs to eat a meal, and had to radio dispatch to request permission to take a lunch break at the chosen time. If an employee was unable to take a lunch break due to call volume, Yellow required the employee to submit a missed lunch slip, which the employer would review for accuracy.

The court affirmed the dismissal of the wage-and-hour claim:

Yellow required its employees to radio the dispatcher to request a lunch break. EMTs had to eat within one mile of an assigned stand-by location. If the crews were “out of unit,” they had to maintain radio contact and were subject to any available run. They were expected to answer the radio after the first call. However, there was no policy that employees remain in the truck for lunch, and plaintiffs introduced no evidence that they were ever told they had to eat in the truck. Nor do the plaintiffs cite any evidence that while on a lunch break they were required to perform duties beyond responding to a call, or that once approved for a lunch break they were frequently interrupted by radio contact.... Yellow’s policies do not indicate that the plaintiffs were engaged in substantial duties during their lunch break.

This case illustrates the importance of having a policy and process in place to know when your employees are, and are not, working. Employees need to be paid for all time spent “working.” If you have a process in place, however, by which employees must notify you of when they are working outside the norm (whether it be a lunch break, or pre- or post-shift), then you will be able to verify the claim, and pay when you can confirm that work has been performed outside the normal shift boundaries. Absent that documentation, however, you are left in a the unenviable position of having to prove a negative (the employee was not working when he says he was), which is not the position you want to find yourself in defending one of these cases.

More on the importance of being accommodating

Yesterday, I wrote about the need for employers to be more accommodating for their employees’ protected needs. Today, I bring you two real-world illustrations.

• Yesterday, the EEOC announced that it had filed suit on behalf of an employee who was denied the opportunity to return to work following some time off for a cardiac condition.
• Late last year, the EEOC reached an $85,000 settlement with an employer who fired an employee attempting to return to work following time off for cancer chemotherapy treatments.

In both instances, the EEOC made the same point—the ADA imposes on employers an absolute duty to determine whether or not they can accommodate an employee’s disability. Absent that consideration, the law has been violated. Moreover, after engaging in that interactive process, the employer can only deny the request: 1) if it poses an undue hardship, or 2) if the employee cannot perform the essential functions of the job with or without the accommodation. Otherwise, you may find yourself on the receiving end of an EEOC press release, which is not the position you want to be in.