Rojgar Job News

An applicant for a job posting in education lists his most recent relevant experience as occurring in 1973.  You don’t bring him in for an interview. Is it gender discrimination? Beyond that, if he says that he is the most qualified candidate — do you have to hire him? And if you don’t hire the most qualified person, is that evidence of gender discrimination? No to all three, says one recent federal court decision. The decision by the court was quietly released late last month and might otherwise go unnoticed, but it underscores an important point for employers. In the matter, the Plaintiff argued that the employer discriminated against him because of his gender by denying him the opportunity for a job interview.   The employer chose four female and two male candidates for interviews. The Plaintiff argued that he was more qualified than the female candidates who were interviewed and ultimately hired by the employer. The court said, however, that the...

Shorter is better. Why? The slang TL;DR comes to mind. But it turns out there’s an educational component too — at least according to the results of a new study that examined workplace contracts. In the study, published in the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology and recapped by Insights by Stanford Business School, “the researchers found that workers whose contracts contained more general language spent more time on their tasks, generated more original ideas, and were more likely to cooperate with others. They were also more likely to return for future work with the same employer, underscoring the durable and long-lasting nature of the effect.” In other words, contracts that contained pages upon pages of specific do’s and don’t for workers, ended up harming the employment relationship. Instead, researchers found that “the more general contracts increased people’s sense of autonomy over their work.” This isn...

With a weekend of football championships behind us, this post tackles the privacy developments that employers here in Connecticut need to run down.  Indeed, while I could just pass off two recent posts from my colleagues, it’s worth going through a progression of options. One development is for the U.S. “ patriots” , while another one lets you fly like an eagle to Europe to understand the implications that an EU regulation can have on US employers. Since my beloved New York football giants were out of it since week one, I’m going to just quarterback what you need to know and, for the sake of everyone, put the football puns on the sideline for the rest of the post. First up, the Connecticut Supreme Court last week recognized a private right of action that patients have against their doctors for unauthorized disclosure of confidential information obtained in the course of that relationship.”  My colleagues in the Health Law group have a deta...

I’ll never forget the day I drove into Newtown, Connecticut.  As NBC 30’s Gerry Brooks tweeted this morning: How could you? It was probably the first time I had made my way to that town outside of Danbury. But that wasn’t the reason I remember that day. It was the empty hearse outside a church. Outside a Newtown church It was the massive flag on the history Newtown flagpole at half-mast, blowing in the wind on a crisp December day. It was the countless makeshift memorials and signs reading “Pray for Newtown” that dotted the road. And it was days after one of the worst events in Connecticut and in the nation’s history. Today marks five years since that awful, despicable day in Newtown when 26 children and adults were shot and killed in Newtown. And in the days afterwards, I went to Newtown to deliver dozens upon dozens of gift cards that my wife and I collected in 48 hours after that tragedy from friends, friends of friends, and others. ...

My colleague, Gary Starr, returns this morning with a post on a recent case that has implications for employers nationwide. You wouldn’t think that fingerprinting would be brought into the world of religious accommodations. After all, the importance of background checks cannot be denied, particularly when the prospective employee is going to work with children or the elderly. Vulnerable populations need assurance that those with whom they will be dealing have their best interests at heart. Background checks, however, can raise strange issues for employers when the person asked to authorize a background check indicates that he/she has a religious objection to fingerprinting. In a recent federal case (download here), a bus driver, who was required to submit to a background check to retain her position, refused to undergo a fingerprint background check. She explained that it was her sincere religious belief that fingerprinting is the “mark of the devil” and that fingerpri...

The Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities can sometimes be seen as an easy punching bag by legislators, employees, employers and employment law attorneys. But there’s one area that has been an unequivocal success and where you won’t see almost any headlines. The CHRO several years ago developed the Kids Court Essay Competition which runs each year.  In it, it gives high school and middle students the opportunity to talk about topics that are important to them and shine a spotlight on others who may not have the same opportunity.  In doing so, the competition focuses on important and contemporary civil justice issues. This year’s essay topics were: #Dreamers: The Immigration Debate #Hate Crimes: Don’t Pull the Trigger #MeToo #Where I Live, Who Can I Become #Educational equity: race, power & privilege The CHRO received over 300 (!) entries.  Out of that, five essays were chosen as finalists at both the middle school and high school le...

This time concerning how holiday pay should be calculated for those who only work for part of the year, e.g. term-time workers, and arguably proof positive of the old legal maxim that “hard cases make bad law”. The Court of Appeal in The Harper Trust v Brazel has said that employers should not use the ordinary rolled-up premium of 12.07% of annual pay to calculate holiday pay for workers who only work for part of the year and who do not have normal working hours. Such workers are instead entitled to have their statutory holiday pay entitlement calculated in accordance with the “week’s pay” provisions set out in the Working Time Regulations 1998, i.e. based on their average earnings over the 12-week period prior to taking leave. In practice, this will normally mean higher holiday pay payments are due. Ms Brazel is a part-time music teacher at Bedford Girls School. She was described by the Court of Appeal as a ‘part year’ worker because she only ...