Articles Posted in Employment Law

There are damages only if there is a contractual obligation for the employer to pay severance pay. Severance pay means that the employer is going to pay a certain amount of money at the end of the employment relationship. Some employees have written agreements ahead of time, where there has been a promise by the…

Deductions from an employee’s wages typically are going to be taxes such as social security tax, medicare tax, federal income tax withholding. Sometimes there’ll be other things that are required by the government to withhold such as child support. Typically though an employer sometimes will enter an agreement with an employee where there will be…

There are many laws that protect employees from employment discrimination. Examples of these laws include laws that prohibit employees from being discriminated against based on their race or their ethnicity or their gender. There are many other laws that the legislatures have created in recent years, such as discrimination based on sexual orientation or whistle…

Employment at will means that the employer does not need a reason, nor does the employee need a reason, to terminate the employment relationship. It can be terminable at any point in time with or without any reason. A cause provision, by contrast, requires there be a good reason for it: for example, poor performance,…

To be discriminated against at work means that the employee is being protected by specific legal categories, such as the color of their skin or their ethnicity. When an employer violates employee’s rights to be free of discrimination, the employer is treating the employee worse because of this protected category, mainly the color of their…

The Family Medical Leave Act is a federal statute that allows employees to take a certain amount of leave time for very important events such as, for example, the birth of a child or to care for a very close family member. To fall within that statute, the employee has to work for a certain…

A fiduciary duty is the highest level of duty the law recognizes. It requires the fiduciary to place the interests of the beneficiary ahead of the fiduciary’s. In other words, whatever the transaction the fiduciary is engaging in, it has to be solely for the benefit of the beneficiary or the client.

Typically, neither the employee nor the employer has to give a notice of termination. There can be exceptions to that. The most common exception, if there’s a written contract, one party has agreed to give a certain amount of written notice to the other party. If that happens, then the contract will trigger certain events…

If a person is laid off and a younger person is kept, that’s not necessarily discrimination. It’s possible but not necessarily. There could be valid business reasons that the employer would have to retain a more junior employee, because, for example, their pay was substantially less than the person who’s laid off, or their work…

Sometimes employees will lose their job if they blew the whistle. Sometimes the employees have not legitimately blown the whistle, but they’re simply trying to protect themselves from their own actions of the business and they’re trying to come with something to get back at the employer. Other times employees are legitimately objecting to activities…