Free Republic

The dark cloud of a good deed hangs over a Michigan restaurant, because days after it made the news over a massive tip left by a customer, the server who received the tip was fired.The saga began on Feb. 5, when a man had $32.43 worth of breakfast at the Mason Jar Café in Benton Harbor, Michigan. He left a $10,000 tip, according to the Detroit Free Press.

Almost everyone reading this will have worried, even just for a moment, about what they have searched online on their work computer, or said to a colleague on Slack. And while most write it off as being 'paranoid', there is good reason to be concerned about what you do and say at work, even if it is done virtually. Katie Winstanley, Group Head of HR, at global recruitment specialist Morson Group, told DailyMail.com that 60 percent of employers are now using some form of ‘bossware’ on company devices - software that tracks employee productivity or performance monitoring. Winstanley said that...

Covid-19-related lawsuits against employers accelerated early in 2021 and maintained a steady pace throughout the year, but some new pain points for employers emerged in the fourth quarter that could foreshadow challenges on the horizon. According to law firm Fisher Phillips LLP's Covid-19 litigation tracker, there were at least 2,878 Covid-19-related employment lawsuits filed in 2021. That represented a significant jump over the 1,341 cases filed in 2020 when the pandemic was still in its earliest stages. The pace of lawsuits didn't significantly increase after it picked up steam in early 2021 — it hovered around 240 cases per quarter...

Governor Abbott has NOT placed SB 65 file by Sen. Bob Hall on the docket for the Special Session. Please contact Governor Abbott

Has anyone submitted to their employer a religious exemption declaration/request against a mandated COVID vaccination policy? How did you format it, and what info did you include? My company is requiring any exemption documentation be submitted no later than Sept 13th. Has anyone submitted one and been questioned?

Last week, a bipartisan group of hundreds of business owners and employers in Colorado got together to send a letter to Governor Jared Polis. They were asking that he put an end to the $300 per week federal enhancements to unemployment benefits, as the governors of other states have already done. Their underlying message was, ‘we need our workforce back.’ There are help-wanted signs all over the state, but not enough workers to fill nearly all of the positions. They didn’t have to wait long to get their response. The Governor said that while he wishes he could help, this...

The scheme would most importantly take local housing costs and employer & employee status into account. The basic housing cost factor would be the square root of the pre-Covid 2019 HUD fair market rent of a one-bedroom apartment in the zip code area of the employee's most common work site divided by 10, rounded. Typical HUD fair market rents might be around $1,200/month in much of America, $2,000/month in some big cities and $3,000/month in prime SF Bay areas. The basic housing cost factors for those amounts would be $10.95, $14.14 and $17.32, respectively. To compute the base minimum wage,...

A Georgia man who faked a COVID-19 diagnosis to get out of work has pleaded guilty to the scheme that cost his employer tens of thousands of dollars, prosecutors said. Santwon Antonio Davis, 35, of Morrow, pleaded guilty to wire fraud for sending his employer a bogus medical excuse letter about a COVID-19 diagnosis in May, the US attorney’s office in Atlanta said Monday.

Now that the outbreak of the COVID-19 disease appears to be more under control, the staff is slowly returning back to work. Therefore, make sure all precautions below are taken into consideration as the management of a company. This checklist is specially prepared for those companies that open office during and after the COVID-19 outbreak. This checklist consists of good practices and helps to ensure a smooth transition back to work for employers. Since the discovery of the coronavirus, it's common that WHO or other health care organizations send daily updates to members and the audience to provide details regarding...

In the aftermath of the passage of legislation aimed at limiting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in California, the state has released rules employers must follow or risk fines of up to $10,000 per offense. The Immigrant Worker Protection Act prohibits employers from voluntarily granting ICE agents access to private areas of worksites or to employee records. If ICE agents have a judicial warrant or subpoena for the records, however, the state law allows employers to grant them access, according to guidelines released by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra. Under the new state law, employers must also notify employees...

USMC Vet: Employer Won't Let Me Come to Work With PTSD Service Dog A United States Marine Corps veteran who suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder said his employer won't let him come to work with his service dog. Yauncey Long said Cincinnati Bell, a Midwest telecomm company, refused to let him work in the company of his service dog, C4. Long said he's gotten pushback from the company, including "unsatisfactory" responses from management, after he applied for reasonable accommodations. He said he was sent home every day for a week without pay after he came to work with C4. Long...

House GOP would let employers demand workers' genetic test results https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/10/workplace-wellness-genetic-testing/ House Republicans would let employers demand workers’ genetic test results By Sharon Begley @sxbegle March 10, 2017 A little-noticed bill moving through Congress would allow companies to require employees to undergo genetic testing or risk paying a penalty of thousands of dollars, and would let employers see that genetic and other health information. Giving employers such power is now prohibited by legislation including the 2008 genetic privacy and nondiscrimination law known as GINA. The new bill gets around that landmark law by stating explicitly that GINA and other protections do...

Good Quality Health Coverage Employer Tax Credit [President Trump has promised to improve health coverage and lower employer tax burdens.] Employers who allow every qualified employee and normally on-site, employer-managed "contracted"/"self-employed" person with at least six months/$6,000 of employment to sign up for qualified care and drug coverage (in the following calendar year) may claim a tax credit of $3 against their federal corporate or personal income tax, but never both, for: 1. each qualified employee who received qualified care and drug coverage from the employer for a week and paid no more than $10 per week for it 2....

Stopped by @TrumpDC to thank all of the tremendous men & women for their hard work!

One of the worst of Obamacares ill-conceived provisions went quietly into effect on January 1. The employer mandate, previously inflicted only on businesses with 100 or more employees, will now be imposed on those with as few as 50. This mandate will prevent countless small employers from hiring workers they would otherwise have hired and incentivize many others to replace full-time employees with part-timers. It is such an obvious job killer that the Obama administration delayed enforcement until after the 2014 midterms, the liberal Urban Institute has called for its repeal, and it has even been obliquely criticized by Hillary...

In its crusade to protect and assist illegal immigrants, the Obama administration has accused an American company of discrimination for requiring employees to furnish proof that they are eligible to work legally in the United States.You know the nation is in trouble when a U.S. business gets investigated by its own government for following the law. The case involves a Nebraska meat packing company that demanded workers to furnish proof of immigration status for the federal employment eligibility verification process. The Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) went after the company, accusing it of engaging in employment discrimination.In particular the DOJ’s...

You can rightly complain about the things which go on inside the White House, the State Department, the Justice Department or the EPA and all of the headline grabbing controversies which erupt from them. None of them, however, may be up to nearly as much mischief as the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) though it doesn’t seem to catch the attention of the media nearly as much. This week they were at it again and while a bit on the wonky side, a new wrinkle in the rules could spell big trouble for America’s employers and many, many workers....

A California woman claims she was fired after disabling an app with a GPS function that was required to run on her company iPhone and tracked her 24 hours a day. Myrna Arias was working for money transfer service company, Intermex, last year when she claims her boss, John Stubits, 'bragged that he knew how fast she was driving' at certain times after she had installed the app, Xora, according to the lawsuit. She then objected to being monitored during non-work hours claiming it was an invasion of her privacy and 'likened the app to a prisoner's ankle bracelet'. Arias...

Millions of Americans are embracing health and fitness tracking devices — such as Fitbit and the new Apple Watch — to boost their health and wellness. But a new study suggests a potential downside of the new med-tech devices: Employers may begin to require them for some workers to hold down rising healthcare costs. MarketWatch reports that millions of the devices are expected to be introduced into the workplace by 2018 as employers adopt incentivized wellness programs to tackle rising health care costs, according to a study by Verizon Enterprise Solutions. “Tracker information will become part of your health record,”...

**SNIP** The White House delayed the mandate twice, moves that Republicans lambasted as political ploys to delay enforcement until after the midterm elections. The issue will be thrust back into the public eye in the coming weeks, when congressional Republicans taking control of both chambers try to force changes to the rule. GOP lawmakers say leadership will hold votes to change the mandate’s definition of full-time work from 30 hours to 40 hours, as even some Democrats fear the nontraditional definition is hurting the workforce. Republican lawmakers have coined a phrase, “the 29ers,” to describe people whose hours were cut...