Employment Newsletter

Sexual Orientation Discrimination in the Workplace

Historically, employers, both public and private, were free to discriminate against employees or applicants because of their sexual orientation, which includes homosexuality, heterosexuality, and bisexuality. It was not illegal to fire, refuse to hire, or to demote someone because he or she was a homosexual. Today, while sexual orientation is not afforded the same broad protection from discrimination as race, religion, or gender, it's protection from discrimination has been steadily increasing at the federal, state, and local levels. More...

Pre-Employee Screening -- Reference Checking

Threat of Defamation LitigationMore...

Employee Inventions -- Special Employment

When a person creates or invents something during the course of employment by another person or business, he may or may not own his creation. Typically, ownership is determined by a number of factors, including whether or not the individual was hired for the purpose of inventing and whether or not he used company time and resources to do so. Beyond these general guidelines, however, there are a number of unique employment arrangements that may play a role in determining ownership.More...

The Employment and Training Administration

The Employment and Training Administration (ETA) is an agency of the U.S. Department of Labor. The ETA states that its mission is to "contribute to the more efficient functioning of the U.S. labor market by providing high quality job training, employment, labor market information, and income maintenance services primarily through state and local workforce development systems."More...

Employer Liability for Workplace Violence

Although the term "workplace violence" may conjure images of an armed disgruntled employee entering his or her current or former place of work and opening fire on supervisors or fellow employees, such incidents make up a very small percentage of all workplace violence. Much more common are harassment and intimidation, assault, robbery, and even spousal violence directed towards employees in the workplace, which contribute to over 1,000 workplace homicides per year and thousands more injuries. For cases that evolve into lawsuits, the average settlement for an incident of workplace violence is $500,000 and the average jury award is $3 million. More...