Topics: Your Job & The Law - 1493 results

At the root of an uptick in cruise ship mishaps and disasters may be overworked and fatigued crew members, a maritime law firm is claiming. The spread of foreign arbitration clauses in employee contracts that prevent workers from seeking recourse for complaints within the U.S. legal system may lead to human error that contributes to debacles such as the stranded Carnival Triumph cruise earlier this year. “The enforcement of these foreign arbitration clauses against crew have single-handedly turned the tide of almost two …

A recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit states that a plaintiff may bring a harassment claim against an employer for a single offensive slur, if the insult is egregious enough. The case revolves around Magliore Ayissi Etoh, a black man originally from Cameroon, who was hired by Fannie Mae in April 2008 as a financial modeler. The company created a new “team leader” position later in the year, and out of a dozen people promoted, …

Joining a handful of other states that limit employer access to social media accounts, New Mexico on Apr. 5 passed a law forbidding employers from demanding passwords from prospective employees.   Job Applicants Only Under the new law, employers are forbidden from requesting or requiring job applicants to provide access to their social media accounts. “Joining Maryland, Illinois, California, Michigan and Utah, New Mexico is now the sixth state to prohibit employers from mandating access to a job applicant’s password-protected …

Five protestors were arrested last week in Philadelphia for blocking traffic in an effort to call attention to a crime that is a menace to hourly workers nationwide: wage theft. Wage theft can refer to any number of ways in which an employer shorts employees on the pay they are legally entitled to, be it by paying less than minimum wage, not paying overtime, making people work off the clock, dipping into tips or refusing to pay last wages for workers …

A trucker who was hit on the head by a falling box of Dollar General merchandise won a $2.2 million jury verdict. It was Black Friday in 2007, the busiest retail day of the year, when Gregory Baird was unloading his truck of boxes of merchandise at the Dollar General store in Troy, Mo. It was at night and he couldn’t see clearly and didn’t use a light. Suddenly, a 38-pound box that was not loaded into the truck correctly …