Rojgar Job News

“Technology is a wonderful thing but it’s scary when it’s weaponized against you.” The first sign that my wife’s identity and my own were under attack came innocently enough. It was an e-mail alert that we get from time to time from Comcast, so innocent that I almost ignored it.  But it said our password had been changed.  When we tried to log-in to download e-mail, the system indicated the password was incorrect. “That’s weird”, we thought. I mean, we have two factor authentication on it so that if someone DOES try to change the password, shouldn’t they need a code? So I called Comcast and was assured repeated that our password wasn’t changed and our account was not compromised. They said it was a phishing exercise and the e-mails were fake too. As for the account access, they said that someone may have just tried to access it but they were unsuccessful. Comcast easily reset the password for me and since two factor a...

Do you remember when the Target store data breach made news? This was not that long ago, and yet, five years later we’ve arguably become immune to the news. Take Facebook’s latest snafu — 50 million accounts compromised.  And yet, it hardly made headlines for a 24 hour period. Heck, even the U.S. State Department has had personal information about its employees breached in the last month — though “only” one percent may have been affected – so…yawn. Have we become that immune to such breaches at this point?  Perhaps. But that doesn’t mean that employers can let their guard down. Indeed, I would argue that new laws and regulations (including one in California) are making the job of employers even more challenging. I’ll be talking about all of this at my firm’s upcoming Labor & Employment Seminar later this month with my colleague Ashley Marshall.  It’s scheduled for October 25th at the Hartford Mar...

Earlier this month, the EEOC released its statistics regarding charges for 2018.  I love looking at these because there are certain trends that always pop out. (You can see some prior years here and here.) Here are five big takeaways that employers in Connecticut can learn from these numbers. Charges Continue to Go Down — a Lot.  For the seventh year in a row, the number of charges processed by the EEOC continued to go down.  In 2018, the EEOC handled 76,418 charges, a 9.3 percent drop from 2017.  This is down substantially from the high water mark in 2011 of 99,947 and the lowest total in general since 2006. But, Some Claims are Way Up.  Perhaps not surprisingly given the attention that continues to be paid to the #metoo movement, sexual harassment claims are up. In 2018, the EEOC received 7,609 sexual harassment charges — a 13.6 percent increase from 2017. Sex Harassment Claims are Also More Costly .  The EEOC received $56.6M in mo...

As I noted last week, I’l be talking at CBIA’s Employment Law Conference on the topic of “Artificial Intelligence & Analytics for HR: Recruiting, Retention & Engagement” next month. Joining me on the panel is Doug Smith, the SVP Client Delivery at Tallan, which has offices in the Greater Hartford area.  I thought it might be enlightening to ask Doug a few questions about AI and Analytics in the Workplace before our talk. He was gracious enough to humor me with answers to my questions. Really looking forward to our discussion in two weeks.  In any event, here’s a return of my ongoing Five, Six Questions Series…. Is there really a place for data analytics in HR? Definitely.  It has the most impact in larger companies, but even the smaller companies can gain insight by tracking and analyzing their data.  It’s amazing what you can find when you start to really look. Fair enough. What are the opportunities? There ar...

In preparation for a webinar I gave this week with my colleague Chris Engler (which, by the way, you can access here) I took a deeper dive into the statistics from the annual report released by the CHRO, in a followup to my initial report here. When you look at the numbers in a snapshot, it’s sometimes hard to see where things are going. But thankfully, the CHRO has nearly two decades’ worth of data to parse through. So, I thought it might be useful to go back a decade to the 2008-09 annual report and compare it with 2018-2019 to see if we can gain a larger perspective on both the work of the CHRO and where we are in the state of employment law. Overall, I was left with questions that don’t have easy answers. So, let’s go through a few of the data points; the reports are all pretty much written the same way, with the same categories used: Complaints filed by Region : Overall, all complaints (housing, employment etc) were up in FY 2019 to 2625 from 2001 ten y...

If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you know that this is my absolute favorite time of the year. No, it’s not Thanksgiving (though we should give thanks as I’ll explain in a second). But rather, it’s the release of the Annual Case Processing Report from the CHRO!  Yes, we should give thanks to the CHRO for putting this out.   It really is helpful to understand some trends and to see how the CHRO’s statutes are being put into practice. But before we look at this year’s numbers, you should probably read my post from last year to get your bearings.  When last we checked, sexual harassment claims were up, employment discrimination claims were up, and cases withdrawn with settlement were down. So what trends does the report for 2018-2019 show? Here’s what stands out. Sexual Harassment claims continue to rise and are now at their highest numbers in the last 20 years. In 2017/18, there were 235 claims file. Last year? 279....

In part 1 of an upcoming series of posts on the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), members of our Data Privacy & Cybersecurity and Labor & Employment practices discusses the limited moratorium on employee/worker data, the scope of the exemption under the moratorium and what employers need to do now.  The full post is available on our sister blog, Security & Privacy//Bytes.

On October 29, 2019, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered that the EEOC must continue to take all steps necessary to complete EEO-1 Component 2 data collection for calendar years 2017 and 2018.  As we recently discussed here, the EEOC filed a motion on October 8, 2019 asking the court to issue an order deeming the Component 2 data collection “complete.”  The court denied the EEOC’s request and ordered the agency to keep collecting pay data until January 31, 2020.  The court relied on its own April 25, 2019 Order, which states that the pay data collection will not be deemed complete “until the percentage of EEO-1 reporters that have submitted their required EEO-1 Component 2 reports equals or exceeds the mean percentage of EEO-1 reporters that actually submitted EEO-1 reports in each of the past four reporting years.”   The parties disagreed about how to calculate the mean percentage, but the court determined ...

As we most recently reported here and here, as of September 30, 2019, employers with 100 or more employees  (and federal contractors with 50 or more employees) were required to report to the federal government pay data for 2017 and 2018 for their workforce (known as “Component 2” data), broken down by race/ethnicity, sex, and job category.  However, consistent with its current practice regarding submission of Component 1 data – which consists of a listing of employees’ job category, sex, race, and ethnicity – the EEOC has agreed to continue collecting Component 2 data for a six-week period after the September 30, 2019 deadline, ending on November 11, 2019.  The pay data collection process has been the subject of ongoing litigation in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.  In April 2019, it issued an order approving the September 30, 2019 deadline and requiring the EEOC to file status reports every 21 days explaining ...

Unheralded and unannounced, recently revised GDPR guidance from the ICO removed one small source of comfort for employers facing DSARs from employees. It used to say that the 30-day time limit was paused, the clock stopped, if you asked the requester for information to clarify his DSAR and it was not provided. This was not carte blanche to delay things – the request for clarification had to be made as soon as possible (i.e. not Day 29) and it had to relate to information you genuinely and reasonably needed in order to comply with the DSAR. Still, it was better than nothing in a tight corner. You also had to do your best to comply in a timely manner with those parts of the DSAR not covered by your request for further information. However, it has now gone. The revised guidance still allows you to seek clarity from the maker of the DSAR but makes it clear that the clock is not stopped pending receipt of it. There is no explanation of why the original guidance has been changed alread...

Just flicking idly through the ICO’s new guidance the other evening, as you do when the only alternative is Ant & Dec, and two paragraphs caught my eye. In the section relating to DSARs which are “ manifestly unfounded ” (and can therefore be batted away by the employer) appear two examples, where: “ the individual clearly has no intention to exercise their right of access. For example, an individual makes a request but then offers to withdraw it in return for some sort of benefit from the organisation” ; and “ the request is malicious in intent and is being used to harass an organisation with no real purpose other than to cause disruption” . There will be few employers on the receiving end of a DSAR from a disgruntled employee who would not consider either or both of those paragraphs to apply to it. So is this at last a means of pushing back against the weaponisation of DSARs in employment disputes, hooray? And if you add to that the refere...