With the holiday coming up, I wanted to write a quick post
linking to some interesting (and in one case bizarre) labor and employment law
stories. I hope everyone has a safe and happy Thanksgiving.
The Shirazi Law Firm has an interesting post about how Magic
Johnson is currently being sued by a former employee for age discrimination
after he allegedly fired her in order to replace her with a younger woman. The
employee, a former flight attendant on Magic’s personal plane, also claims she
wasn’t given appropriate opportunities to take lunch breaks or rest while she
was working.
In a stranger story, the Employment Discrimination Report
analyzes the EEOC’s recent appeal of the “Great Texas Lactation Case”. The case
involves an appeal of a Texas court’s ruling that Title VII doesn’t protect
women from firing for breast feeding on the job. The EEOC claims that the
Pregnancy Discrimination Act amends Title VII to provide for this protection.
It looks like the case will oddly turn on how narrowly the court decides to
read statue’s definitions of breast feeding.
JD Supra looks at how the NLRB has expanded
employers’ responsibilities to respond to union requests for “presumptively
relevant” information. The decision by the NLRB has expanded the information
provision requirement to include information the employer may believe is
irrelevant. The big legal change was the Board writing that “an employer must
timely respond to a union request seeking relevant information even when the
employer believes it has grounds for not providing the information”. Employers
should be careful to promptly provide all information generally relevant to
bargaining-unit employees.
Finally, The Employer Handbook has an interesting video of a
discussion among labor and employment law attorneys regarding HR-related
workplace problems. The issues include whether employees should report to HR
comments overhead in the workplace that may be either discriminatory or
confidential.