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As I argued last week in my blog post on CELA Voice, we’re spending more time telling women how to navigate around bias in the workplace than we are trying to fix it. In the second post of the series, titled Organizations have the power to reduce unconscious bias, I explain how employers can reduce the effects of bias in their workplace. Many mistakenly believe that it would be too hard or take too […]
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We’ve had a surge of self-help articles and books telling women how they should act if they want to advance in the workplace. For example, women are told to “lean in,” “be more confident,” and “ask for a raise, but do it in a way that is ‘feminine’ so you don’t come off as demanding or unlikeable.”
Sex discrimination has been illegal for fifty years. Rather than telling women how to navigate a biased system, shouldn’t we focus on how to stop the bias in the first place?
Ramit’s two-part series, published in the CELA Voice Blog, addresses implicit biases, how they hurt women in the workplace, and what employers can do to reduce their effects. . . .
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Yesterday, the EEOC issued a new publication that discusses employees’ rights with respect to religious grooming and dress in the workplace. The publication, Religious Garb and Grooming in the Workplace: Rights and Responsibilities, is written in question-and-answer form and addresses some of the most common issues that come up when workers require religious accommodations with respect to their clothing and grooming. It is meant to guide employees and employers; you do not need to be a lawyer to understand it.
Here are some of the key points from the EEOC’s publication:…
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As corporate profits soar, American workers’ pay keep falling behind. But the movement to increase the minimum wage for American workers has been gaining momentum. In the past year, six states, including California, have raised their minimum wage. Here in California, the minimum wage will go from the current rate of $8 an hour to $9 an hour on July 2, 2014 and to $10 an hour on January 1, 2016. Now, the movement is getting national attention.
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23 Jan '14
How many times have you heard someone coughing, sneezing, and snotting away at work and wondered why they didn’t just stay home? Did you wince every time they coughed? Were you scared of getting sick yourself? Did you get sick? People come in to work while sick for a number of reasons, but for many it is financial: they simply cannot afford to take an unpaid day off work. That may change soon.
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As social media use has become widespread, it has become common practice for employers to search the social media accounts of potential and current employees, and to take action as a result of postings on social media sites. A 2012 CareerBuilder survey found that 37% of employers use social networking sites to research job candidates. They do so to learn more about the candidates, and to determine whether there are reasons not to hire them. Many employers also monitor the social media accounts of their current employees. Depending on how it is done, such monitoring can be unlawful, particularly if an employer is seeking […]
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The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) require accommodations for employees with disabilities. If a qualified employee requests a reasonable accommodation, the employer must provide it unless it “can demonstrate that the accommodation would impose an undue hardship on the operation […]
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2014 will be the year of the whistleblower in California.
Here’s why: On January 1, 2014, new laws (AB 263, SB 496, and SB 666) went into effect that fixed major gaps in Labor Code § 1102.5, the California whistleblower protection law. These are gaps that you probably didn’t even know existed . . . .
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This is another post in my series on mistakes employers make. In this post, I discuss employer leave policies–specifically those that impose maximum leave amounts and “no fault” attendance policies–and why they can end up unlawfully denying employees their rights. While this post covers obligations under both the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA), I will refer to the ADA only with the understanding that it sets the “floor of protection” under the FEHA (and the FEHA, in fact, affords workers greater protections).
An Inflexible Maximum Leave Policy Violates the ADA
Many employers have “maximum leave” policies, under which employees are automatically terminated. . . .
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Reader, you can help bring paid family and medical leave to Americans throughout the country!
Today, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) will introduce the Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act (“FAMILY Act”). If passed, this bill will provide workers throughout the country with up to 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave.
In a post I wrote for CELA Voice, . . . .
