Tag Archives: Personnel Policies

Policy revision

Your Employee Policy Handbook Needs Revision (Again)

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Because of a recent decision by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), your employee policies probably need a major rewrite to avoid an unfair labor practices charge. This decision applies to big and small companies, those that are unionized and those that are not.

In August 2023 in Stericycle, Inc., the Board adopted a strict new legal standard for reviewing workplace rules. In order to protect the employees’ right to organize and “to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection”, as Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act requires, employers cannot promulgate, maintain or enforce work rules that tend to inhibit employees from exercising their rights under the Act.

What are those concerted activities that employees may engage in together? Just a few examples:

  • Employees discussing or complaining about their salaries, benefits, and other working conditions;
  • Employees refusing to work in unsafe conditions;
  • Employees complaining about unfair treatment by a supervisor;
  • Employees openly talking to each other, on social media, to the press or otherwise about their complaints about their employer;
  • Employees joining with co-workers to grieve any mistreatment, file claims with a governmental agency or otherwise protest any aspect of their jobs.

You as an employer cannot prohibit any of these activities or discipline an employee for engaging in them. Moreover, you cannot have policies that discourage these protected concerted activities.

Policy handbooks have come under scrutiny by the NRLB frequently in the last 10 years, but the Stericycle decision takes this scrutiny to a new level. If the NRLB finds that an employer’s policies have a reasonable tendency to chill employees exercising of their Section 7 rights, then it is presumptively an unfair labor practice.

The NRLB looks at the rules from the viewpoint of an employee who is economically dependent on the employer, rather than just applying a reasonable person standard. The employer can only rebut the presumption that the rule is unlawful by showing the policy serves a legitimate and substantial business purpose and it is as narrowly tailored as possible.

Continue reading Your Employee Policy Handbook Needs Revision (Again) →

Paid Sick Leave Required in Some Texas Cities

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Do you as an employer provide your employees in Texas at least six to eight days of paid sick leave every year? If you have employees who work in Dallas or San Antonio, you are about to be required to do so. You should be immediately adding a paid sick leave policy that complies with municipal ordinances that take effect August 1, 2019 in those two cities.

If you have an employee who works at least 80 hours per year in the city limits of Dallas or San Antonio, the new ordinances require you as the employer (if you employ five or more people anywhere) to provide that employee with one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours that the employee works within those city limits. It doesn’t matter if your business isn’t based in one of those cities, just whether your employee performs work there.

Of course, offering this paid sick leave only to your employees who work in San Antonio and Dallas could create workforce animosity and claims of discrimination among your other employees, so employers making changes to their policies need to carefully consider whether a company-wide sick leave policy revision is the smartest move at this point.

Here are the general details of the two municipal paid sick leave ordinances in Dallas and San Antonio. You should ask your employment lawyer to help you include the specifics in your revised written sick leave policy if you have Dallas and San Antonio workers:

  • If you have 15 or more employees, then you must allow your Dallas and San Antonio employees to accrue at least 64 hours of sick leave per year. For smaller employers (5-14 employees employed anywhere), the total amount of paid sick leave required per year is 48 hours.
  • The paid sick leave laws apply to full and part-time employees, so those of you who don’t provide benefits to part-time employees in Dallas and San Antonio will need to revise your policies.
  • These ordinances say that employees can use their paid sick leave as soon as it is accrued. So if you require an initial probationary or orientation period in which paid time off can’t be used, you’ll have to rethink your policy in that regard.
  • This paid sick leave can be used for more than employee’s own mental or physical health problems. The employee can take the paid time off for a family member’s illnesses, any family member’s victimization (such as domestic violence or sexual assault), and for doctor’s appointments for the employee or a family member. “Family member” is defined broadly and includes blood relatives as well as anyone who has such a close association with the employee to be considered family (such as a live-in partner).
  • You have to allow carry over of accrued but unused paid sick leave to the next year if you use the accrual method. However, if you provide all of the paid sick leave the employee will be entitled to at the beginning of the year, then you don’t have to allow carry over (this is also much easier to administer than the accrual method).
  • You can’t retaliate against an employee for using the sick leave he/she is entitled to.
  • Enforcement won’t go into full effect on these ordinances until April 2020, but you should be amending your policies now to comply with the August 1, 2019 effective date.

These ordinances have not been without controversy. The business lobby in Texas is fighting hard against these paid sick leave laws. A similar one in Austin is currently enjoined by a court battle, headed to the Texas Supreme Court, and won’t be taking effect as scheduled. But the court battle will take significant time and the 2019 Texas Legislative session ended last month with the lawmakers failing to pass any bill to standardize these municipal ordinances statewide or prohibit cities from passing them, so there is little chance that Dallas and San Antonio’s laws won’t go into effect in August, even if they are challenged in court later.

Even if you don’t have Dallas and San Antonio employees, I think all Texas employers must consider offering paid sick leave right now. Not only are states and cities all over the country requiring this, but employees are coming to expect this benefit.

Plus such a change can benefit an employer in a time of historically low unemployment in this state. It seems that almost every employer that I represent tells me that he/she can’t hire and keep good help. So shouldn’t you be offering some kind of paid sick leave to improve your hiring and retention? Maybe it would be helpful to adopt a policy that would comply with these city ordinances as part of a more comprehensive review and beefing up of your benefits to attract and retain high-quality employees.

Even Walmart (long regarded as one of America’s worst employers) recognized in 2019 the value of providing its hourly employees with 48 hours of paid sick leave per year in addition to regular paid time off. In fact, Walmart’s new company-wide paid sick leave policy looks surprisingly similar to the ordinances just passed by Dallas and San Antonio. Walmart wasn’t being altruistic, of course. It just made the move to standardize its policies to comply with a nationwide patchwork of new state and municipal laws requiring employers provide paid sick leave.

Is a Helicopter Spouse or Parent Hovering Over Your Workplace?

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As an employer, can you insist on an employee talking for himself rather than you listening to input from his helicopter spouse or parent? Thankfully, the answer is “yes”.

You do not need to allow an applicant’s parent or spouse to fill out the application, set up the interview, attend the interview, ask questions by text during the interview, call to ask how the interview went, or insist on knowing the salary and terms of employment when the job is offered.

In fact, if any of these occur when you are considering a job candidate, I would have to question your judgment if you hired that candidate without seriously pondering his/her maturity to actually handle a job at your company.

You are not alone if you have had to fend off interfering parents as an employer.

In 2007, the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University published a survey of 725 employers that found that nearly a quarter had encountered parental involvement in the hiring process and the early stages of workers’ careers.

Within that group of employers, more than 30 percent reported parents submitting a résumé for their children; 15 percent reported fielding complaints from a parent when the company didn’t hire their child; and nearly 10 percent said parents had insinuated themselves into salary and benefit negotiations.

New York Times, June 21, 2017.

Similarly, once an employee is working for you, you should let the employee be his/her own mouthpiece. Draw some boundaries and insist that all interactions regarding the employee’s performance, salary, attendance, misbehavior, and termination be conducted only with the employee. If the employee says he/she prefers her helicopter spouse’s involvement, say “no” and remind the employee that if he/she can’t speak for himself/herself, the employee may not be professional enough to work for your company.

I bring this up because after 30 years of employment law practice, I often think there is nothing new under the sun. Granted, Amarillo tends to lag behind nationwide trends. But for the first time this year, I have encountered this helicopter family problem frequently enough that I am recommending a new written policy to my clients along the lines of “ABC Company will discuss job-related matters only with the employee himself or herself and not family members, significant others or friends.”

Sadly, the advice requested recently of me that prompted me adding this policy to employee handbooks was not pushy parents—it was helicopter spouses (or fiancées or significant others). Continue reading Is a Helicopter Spouse or Parent Hovering Over Your Workplace? →

Sexual Harassment Prevention Training Essential

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Training photo

Every employer with 15 or more employees needs to require employees to attend sexual harassment prevention training. That is the takeaway that businesses need to understand from a new task force report on harassment in the workplace that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published in June 2016.

The EEOC’s report states that businesses have “to reboot workplace harassment prevention efforts.” The EEOC is especially concerned that most sexual harassment  prevention training focuses only on defining harassment and telling employees what they are prohibited legally from doing.

Instead, the EEOC is encouraging (read: requiring) businesses to also include workplace civility training and bystander intervention training. If a disgruntled employee makes an illegal harassment claim against your business in the future, the EEOC, as the investigating agency, is going to immediately require your business to provide evidence that you thoroughly trained your employees on these new topics. If the harassment complaint goes to trial, this training will also be your best defense.

Bystander Intervention Training is defined by the EEOC report as training that helps employees identify unwelcome and offensive behavior and creates collective responsibility to step in and take action when they see other employees exhibit problematic behaviors. The training is geared towards empowering employees to intervene when they see unacceptable conduct and gives them resources to do so.

Workplace civility training focuses on teaching employees to abide by reasonable expectations of respect and cooperation in the workplace. The emphasis is supposed to be positive—what the employees should do—rather than those things they are prohibited from doing. The training needs to include navigation of interpersonal relationships, an understanding of conflict resolution and teaching supervisors how to be civility coaches. In other words, it is now the company’s responsibility to teach workers how to be responsible, respectful professionals. On the job training and supervisor modeling is fine, but you need to add formal in-house training also.

Interestingly, at the same time that the EEOC is “encouraging” employers to promote more civility in the workplace and to prevent bullying and harassment, the National Labor Relations Board is issuing decisions that punish non-unionized businesses for written policies requiring employees to be respectful to coworkers.

The NRLB has repeatedly found that a company is infringing on an employee’s labor rights when the employer enforces handbook policies like this one from T-Mobile’s employee manual: “Employees are expected to maintain a positive work environment by communicating in a manner that is conducive to effective working relationships with clients, co-workers and management.” The NRLB thinks that kind of policy has a chilling effect on employees who have a right to discuss with coworkers all of the terms and conditions of their employment. I’ve alerted you about the NRLB’s crusade against policy manuals before.

So you as an employer are left with trying to decide whether to be investigated and sued by the NLRB or the EEOC. Continue reading Sexual Harassment Prevention Training Essential →

Preventing Workplace Violence

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Do you as an employer have a plan to address workplace violence?  This topic is front and center in the wake of the recent workplace shootings in Hesston, KS, Kalamazoo, MI, and Roanoke, VA.  Although legislation has been introduced to provide a “safe harbor” for employees and employers to report violent or threatening behavior, it is important for employers to assess their own workplaces and look at what can be done to make that environment as safe as possible.

The House of Representatives introduced the “Safe Harbor for Reporting Violent Behavior Act” on February 11, 2016, in response to the on-air shooting of a television reporter and cameraman in Roanoke, VA.  This bill would provide immunity from lawsuits to individuals who, in good faith, make a report about an employee (or potential employee) who exhibits violent or threatening behavior.

However, regardless of whether or not this bill passes, employers still have a duty to examine their workplace violence policies and take steps to decrease any possible dangers in the workplace.  Several things that should be done include: Continue reading Preventing Workplace Violence →

Texas Discrimination Charges Too Numerous

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Texas leads the nation in number of charges filed with the EEOC alleging gender discrimination, race discrimination, age discrimination, and disability discrimination, according to a recent story from the Society for Human Resource Management.  It is time for more employee training and better personnel policies for your Texas business so you don’t have to battle a discrimination charge.

 

A Texas Employer’s New Year’s Resolutions 2016

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The quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s is the perfect time for you as an employer to consider some resolutions for 2016. What can you do differently in 2016 to be a better employer and to avoid stepping on any legal landmines?

From 28 years of experience advising employers like you on employment law issues, here are my suggestions for 2016 resolutions with links to more information from previous posts on this website about these topics:

  • Resolve that you will make a decision about whether your employees and/or customers can openly carry handguns on your business premises. The open carry law goes into effect on January 1 and allows those who are licensed to carry concealed handguns to start carrying them openly in shoulder or hip holsters. You have the right as an employer to prohibit guns completely on your premises by both customers and employees, to just prohibit employees from carrying guns, to prohibit open carry but allow concealed carry, or to allow everyone to freely carry handguns on your premises. If you choose to ban either open or concealed carry by customers, you will have to post the §30.06 (concealed carry) and/or §30.07 (open carry) signs with the proper wording and font size required by the Texas Penal Code. To just prohibit employees from coming to work armed, you only need to add a policy to your employee policy manual. For more information about Texas gun laws in the workplace, click here.
  • Resolve that you will get ready for big changes in the overtime laws. If you have an employee to whom you pay an annual salary of less than $50,440, in mid-2016 you are going to have to move that employee’s compensation to an hourly rate and pay that employee overtime if he/she works more than 40 hours in any one workweek. Click here for more information about that change to the Fair Labor Standards Act regulations.
  • Resolve that you will stop using any kind of “contract labor”. The landscape has just gotten too rocky to use any worker whom you do not treat as an employee. Just give up on the idea that you can save the taxes or avoid the pains of having employees. The government is really cracking down on misclassification of workers as contract labor, day workers or independent contractors. That means that in 2016, you need to pay taxes on every worker, you need to provide every full-time worker with benefits, and you need to accept that you will have liability if that worker hurts or mistreats someone. Click here for more information about the dangers of misclassifying a worker as contract labor. If you think you are the exception to this rule, don’t proceed without a knowledgeable attorney’s legal opinion.
  • Resolve that you will update your employment policy manual. The requirements for written policies changed dramatically in 2015 due to the changes required by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the National Labor Relations Board and the Department of Labor. Your policy manual is out of date unless your employment attorney has made significant revisions in the last six months. Click here for more information about some of the changes that are now required.
  • Resolve that you will learn and apply the new rules regarding pregnant employees. Take your maternity policy out of your handbook (because it will be considered discriminatory) and add instead a policy that allows pregnancy and maternity leave that is identical to what you allow when someone has a disability or serious illness. That means that you can’t set a standard 6-week maternity leave, but may have to be more flexible with each pregnant worker’s individual needs like the Americans with Disabilities Act requires with handicapped employees. Click here for more information about how to update your procedures regarding pregnant employees to comply with the new regulations.

 

 

 

NLRB Crackdown on Employee Handbooks

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Even if your HR department is on top of things, some of the policies in your employee handbook probably are now unlawful. Confidentiality policies, professionalism policies, employee conduct policies, solicitation policies, conflict of interest policies, social media policies, and others have come under intense scrutiny by the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) in the last six months. The result could be an unfair labor practices claim filed against your company, even though your company is not unionized. Continue reading NLRB Crackdown on Employee Handbooks →

Employee Free Speech on Facebook

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Is your employee free to post a Facebook rant about one of your supervisors that says, “Bob is such a nasty M___ F___ don’t know how to talk to people!!! F___ his mother and his entire f___ing family!!! What a loser!!! Vote YES for the UNION!!!”?

Many of my West Texas employers would fire the employee on the spot for that Facebook post.  But if you called an employment attorney, you would be advised against that termination because the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) just decided last month that the employer involved in this mess had to reinstate the foul-mouthed employee and pay him lost wages.

The NLRB reasoned that the employee’s vulgar rant was “protected, concerted activity” protected by the federal act relating to the formation of unions. The NLRB noted that the harassment policy in the company’s handbook didn’t prohibit vulgar or offensive language, even though that policy was cited as the basis for the discharge. No employee had ever been fired by this employer before for obscene language. In addition, the company was in the middle of an election to decide if the workplace would be unionized.

However, even if your workplace will never be unionized, your actions as an employer can be scrutinized on the basis of employees engaging in “protected, concerted activity” to improve their pay and working conditions. For a summary of the cases that the NLRB has pursued against non-union employers, see the NLRB’s new website dedicated to their enforcement of that law. https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/protected-concerted-activity

The NLRB has also been very busy telling non-union employers what can and can’t be in an employee policy manual. On March 18, 2015, the NLRB’s general counsel released a memo concerning those employment policies that the NLRB believes have a “chilling effect” on employees’ rights to engage in protected activities. https://www.nlrb.gov/reports-guidance/general-counsel-memos

Here are precautions you can take as an employer to avoid running afoul of the NLRB or a crafty plaintiffs’ employment lawyer that sues you for your “illegal” handbook policies: Continue reading Employee Free Speech on Facebook →

Cell Phone Policy

Forms and Policies, Personnel Policies

I love my smartphone, which acts as my phone, my calendar, my to do list, my address book, my e-mail server, etc. My clients know that my cell phone is always on and that they can call me anytime of the day or night. I took client calls while on the Washington, D.C. metro system this summer and I returned calls on our last camping trip to New Mexico. For me, a cell phone is an essential tool to serve my clients, who are my bosses.

But for some employees, a personal cell phone may get in the way of doing a good job. For many health care, manufacturing, service and retail workers who don’t need to constantly talk to clients on the phone, or who need to deal with the public in person, a cell phone can be very distracting.

Many employers have started to create written policies to deal with all the issues that arise with cell phones in the workplace, such as the privacy issues that occur with cell phone cameras and recorders.  If you as an employer want to address the use of cell phones at your business, here are some items you may want to include in your policy: Continue reading Cell Phone Policy →