What’s New in Employment Law?

Let’s face it. Some days, working in HR feels less like a profession and more like supervising a middle school cafeteria. Except the students have mortgages, LinkedIn profiles, and access to attorneys. Someone is furious because a coworker didn’t invite them to lunch....

California employers can use AI to help make employment decisions, but starting next year, they cannot let the algorithm do the firing. Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 947 on September 30, creating what supporters have dubbed the “No Robo Bosses Act.” The new...

California employers can be forgiven for spending much of their compliance time thinking about California law. The Fair Employment and Housing Act. The Civil Rights Department. California wage and hour rules. California leave laws. California regulations that seem to...

Most workplace problems do not arrive neatly packaged as legal claims. An employee may say a supervisor is treating them differently, complain about a coworker’s comment, announce that they are recording workplace conversations, or raise a discrimination concern in...

Human resources professionals are often the first people to recognize when an ordinary workplace issue is becoming a legal one. An employee mentions retaliation. A leave request gets complicated. A termination suddenly feels risky. A wage-and-hour issue surfaces. Or a...

Labor Day Is About People We spend a lot of time talking about work as though it is separate from the rest of life. It isn’t. People come to work carrying everything with them: grief, fear, divorce, sick parents, sick children, financial stress, new babies, bad news,...

Last week, my daughter lost her horse, Weston, without any notice. I have rewritten that sentence about 10 times because there really isn’t a way to capture what happened. Weston wasn’t just a horse E. rode. He was her partner. They had been together for six years....

It happens all the time. An employee calls out for several days and returns with a doctor’s note. Or HR gets an email saying the employee needs to work from home, avoid lifting, change their schedule, or remain off work for another month. At that point, the employer...

If you work for a larger employer that has spent years preparing the annual EEO-1 Report, the latest development out of Washington may sound like welcome news. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has proposed rescinding the EEO-1 and related reporting...

Flexible work arrangements are here to stay, and many California employers are looking for ways to give employees more control over their schedules. One common request? “Can I work from home for part of the day so I can avoid rush-hour traffic?” Seems simple enough....