http://theemployersadvocate.com Practical Legal Help for Employers in the Texas Panhandle Fri, 04 Jun 2010 21:08:22 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en If you are a business owner or manager, you may have had this great idea at one time: “I can save my company lots of money if I hire ‘contract labor’ instead of employees to do this job.” The hope of every business person is that hiring a contract laborer will ... http://theemployersadvocate.com/?p=677 In the human resources and employment law trade journals that I regularly read, the headlines proclaim repeatedly that employers are paying their employees incorrectly and getting in legal hot water because of those mistakes. The penalties range from the expensive for any small business owner to the absurd for Wal-Mart. At ... http://theemployersadvocate.com/?p=670 Why do these kinds of cases only happen in Texas? In a head-scratching act of stupidity, the president of hatmaking company near Wichita Falls, Crowell Contract and Design, pulled a female employee's pants down in front of her coworkers. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was not amused. It sued on the ... http://theemployersadvocate.com/?p=658 Sears Roebuck & Co. recently settled with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission a class-action lawsuit for $6.2 million, the largest monetary award for a single Americans With Disabilities Act ("ADA") suit in EEOC history. The accusation against Sears was that the company discriminated against the disabled because it had an inflexible ... http://theemployersadvocate.com/?p=651 Many employers have felt victimized by the federal government's sometimes overzealous enforcement efforts on behalf of employees against the companies they work for. For example, the current trend regarding any compensation mistake by the employer is to label it "wage theft" and prosecute the employer like a common purse snatcher. ... http://theemployersadvocate.com/?p=645 Amy Bishop, a 42-year-old biology professor at the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH), walked into a biology faculty meeting on Friday, February 12, and according to eyewitnesses, opened fire on her colleagues, killing three and wounding three others. She is charged with capital murder and the death penalty may be sought. ... http://theemployersadvocate.com/?p=634 There was an insignificant story in the Amarillo newspaper last week about a former credit union employee who was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison for stealing $221,000 from her employer over a seven-year period. At least it seemed insignificant, based on the placement in the paper. But to ... http://theemployersadvocate.com/?p=625 At the end of 2009, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) settled a class action lawsuit against Outback Steakhouse for $19 million. What kind of claim was worth so much money? It was an old-fashioned glass ceiling sex discrimination suit. The EEOC said that Outback denied women equal opportunities to advance ... http://theemployersadvocate.com/?p=615 If you have employees who you believe are exempt from being paid overtime or the minimum wage (and who doesn't?), your company is vulnerable to being accused of "wage theft" by the Department of Labor and being faced with repayment of wages, liquidated (double) damages, interest, penalties and attorneys' fees. ... http://theemployersadvocate.com/?p=605 I've been trying to get the word out to employers for the last several months that the executive branch of the federal government has employers who violate any of the federal employment laws in its sights (click here for an earlier blog post on enforcement efforts). Money for enforcement is ... http://theemployersadvocate.com/?p=596