Rojgar Job News

The Dialogue – an occasional discussion between myself and a prominent employee-side attorney, Nina Pirrotti returns today after a late summer hiatus. Today’s chat focuses on employee separations and severance agreements.  Share your own tips or observations in the comments below. As always, my thanks to Nina for sharing her insights here. Dan: Hi Nina! How was your summer? Mine was fine except I can’t stop hearing news about President Trump. It seems to drown out everything else going on and I think I have a headache from it all. But let’s give it a try, shall we? I know I’m often confronted with having to fashion separation and settlement agreements for employers.    What do you find are the items in agreements that you think both sides ought to be paying attention to? Nina:  Drowning in Trump-related noise.  The image is horrifying!  My husband and I were chatting the other day about an old Saturday night live weekend updat...

Employment law lawyers are asked to review a lot of employment decisions. If we’re lucky, we’re brought in early in the process when the decision isn’t yet final and where our input can be useful. Other times though, we’re asked to opine on decisions after the fact. And truth is, it’s really pretty easy to Monday morning quarterback employment decisions.  Because there is sometimes something that wasn’t thought of before the decision was made. Often, it may not be important. The employer would have still made the same decision if something else was looked it. Had you known that there was a law protecting free speech in the workplace, would you still have disciplined the employee for putting up a post on Facebook about his working conditions? Many employers can’t afford an in-house attorney to bounce their decisions off. So, for those companies, here are five questions to get you thinking BEFORE you make an employment decision. ( Usual ...

If you’ve been playing close attention, this blog has been a bit quiet of late.  Indeed, it’s probably the longest stretch between posts in the 11 years I’ve been doing this. It’s not for lack of ideas. Rather, after many years of spouting off (which, after all, is the underlying purpose of the blog), I found myself desiring to do a lot more listening.  Listening to employers. Listening to my colleagues. Listening to other lawyers.   And the only way to do that was to really stop writing for a while. I don’t profess to have been original in this aspect. I’ve admired a blog from afar that preaches this exact point — Listen Like a Lawyer by Jennifer Romig.  Just a few weeks ago, she highlighted the International Day of Listening — and the theme for this year of “Listening — even when you disagree.” Imagine that. But it’s really so true.  In employment law, listening can help employers and...

The Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunity (CHRO) was sued yesterday by its longtime (and former) Regional Manager Pekah Wallace.  The federal lawsuit claims her employment termination was improper and provides a whole host of information about what has been going on behind the scenes at the agency. You can download the complaint here.   (As with all new lawsuits, my standard warning applies — these are allegations in a complaint, not a determination from a court.) I’ll leave it for others to opine on the merits of the case because my firm represents a number of clients before the agency. The allegations, however, show, at a minimum, that there was a great deal of friction going on at the agency for a number of years — even while the agency was investigating the outside complaints of employees against their own employers too. Ms. Wallace alleges violations of: Conn. Gen. Stat. Sec. 31-51q (applying the First Amendment to the workplace); F...

Can an employer ever win a motion for summary judgment on a discrimination case in state court? The prevailing wisdom is no.  A fool’s errand, some might say. But a new Connecticut Appellate Court case (Alvarez v. City of Middletown) shows at least what’s possible. The case has some details that stand out. The Plaintiff was a probationary police officer who was seeking a more permanent position. In the course of his employment, he had performance deficiencies that were noted. In February 2015, an individual made a complaint that the Plaintiff groped her and made her feel his genitals through his pants while he was responding to a reported domestic incident at her home. While the investigation was ongoing, the Plaintiff’s performance still showed deficiencies including a failure to file written reports.  He was sent a letter that he would face a probationary discharge but he resigned before that happened. The Plaintiff then sued on race and national origin....

As if the pandemic weren’t disorienting enough, the rules and guidance surrounding unemployment compensation feels as if it keeps changing too. While that’s not entirely accurate — Connecticut’s rules are basically unchanged though some of the application of those rules have been tweaked — the new CARES Act has added a layer of complexity that we are only now beginning to sort out. Add to that new guidance released Saturday evening (here) and even more new guidance released by the Department of Labor on Sunday evening, and that’s when things have gotten messy. I can’t recap everything in a single blog post but my partner Peter Murphy has some additional guidance on this issue as well in a post today.   For Connecticut employers, your first resource  must be the CTDOL FAQ that I’ve highlighted before.   For unemployment related to layoffs and terminations,  the rules are still relatively straightforward....

News flash: There’s life beyond the COVID-19 pandemic! In fact, yesterday, the Connecticut Supreme Court released an entirely non-COVID-19 related decision on the topic of “constructive discharge”. I’ve talked about constructive discharge in prior posts, but the new case clarifies nearly two decades of jurisprudence in the area.  Despite the lowering of the bar for employees to raise such claims, employees still have a significant burden to overcome. First off – why is this important? Well, in discrimination cases, an employee has to show an “adverse employment action”.  Normally, that’s a termination of employment.  But sometimes employees quit.  Most of the time, that’s not enough to satisfy an “adverse employment action”.   But in some cases, the employees say that they were compelled to resign — in other words, they were “constructively discharged”. The Supreme...

On October 8, 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in three employment discrimination cases involving what protection, if any, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – which prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of, among other things, sex – affords against sexual orientation and gender identity-based discrimination.  As we previously discussed here, there is currently no explicit protection against such discrimination under federal law, and federal appellate courts are split on the issue.  This term, the Supreme Court will determine whether the language in Title VII that prohibits employment discrimination “because of … sex” also extends to sexual orientation and transgender-based discrimination.   The cases involve three employees, two gay men and a transgender woman, who were fired because of their LGBT status.  Pamela Karlan, attorney for the one of the men, argued before the Court that se...

In January 2018 we wrote about Ribalda –v- Spain , a European Court of Human Rights case in which a number of supermarket employees were awarded compensation for breach of their privacy rights. They had been stealing quite handsomely from their employer over some months, as they freely admitted, but nonetheless thought it entirely improper that the supermarket should be allowed to use covert video footage of them to prove it [here]. The first chamber of the ECHR found that the installation of covert video surveillance without notice to the employees (as notionally required under Spanish law) amounted to a disproportionate interference with their rights under Article 8 of the European Convention (in summary, to respect for one’s private life), hence the compensation. One judge alone, Judge Dedov railed against this – the employees had lost their right to privacy when they decided to steal, he said, and so deserved everything they had got, which was sacked. The matter th...

You have tried to counsel, to mediate and to make every adjustment you possibly can, but in the end you have run into a single insurmountable fact about your employee with the attitude – you just can’t bear him any longer. He is the dragging anchor of your otherwise happy little ship and must be cut loose for everyone’s benefit, potentially including his own. We know that Employment Tribunals get very sticky about conduct or performance cases dressed up to look like “some other substantial reason” loss of trust and confidence clashes. The ETs see this (often entirely properly) as the employer’s attempt to side-step the usual fair dismissal requirements of prior warnings, time to improve, etc. To the extent that your employee’s attitude problem manifested itself primarily through conduct or performance, that is what you should ideally do. This is partly because it might take the shock of formal procedures to jolt your employee out of whatever dar...

The changes in the economy brought on by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), commonly known as the “coronavirus,” present challenges to employers trying to manage their greatest resource – employees. A cross-practice team involving our Tax Strategy & Benefits, Labor & Employment and Data Privacy & Security lawyers have published this alert that identifies some of the top employee benefits issues for employers to be aware of in this ever-changing environment. Read PDF: Top 10 Employee Benefits Issues in a Slowing Economy

In a previous blog, in a world before the coronavirus hit Europe, we noted the social elections that Belgian employers have to organise in 2020 [here] for the appointment of employee representatives to the Works Council and Health & Safety Committee. Being a representative of that sort (and also being a candidate for that role) gives wide-ranging protections against detriment and dismissal. As a consequence, with the social elections comes a Belgian peculiarity, the “occult period”. This is a period of 65 days, ending ultimately on 30 March, over which employees can stand as candidates in those elections but before the candidate list is communicated to the employer. It is therefore unaware who has that protection and who doesn’t. Practical consequence: all terminations are put on hold until April. Because of the Covid-19 crisis however, the social elections have been postponed, probably until the second half of November at the earliest. Mercifully the occult period...

So now that the slow movement back to workplaces has started, the next hot question will be this: “If I don’t want to go back in because I fear infection if I do, can my employer make me?” The short and absolutely definitively answer to this is no.  And yes. It cannot compel you to return but subject to certain conditions (below) you cannot then compel it either to keep paying you or to continue your employment. Some of our clients’ employees have received stark emails in shouty capitals this week telling them categorically not to return to work and that if they don’t, their employer has to keep paying them regardless.  Those emails do not appear to be claimed by any particular organisation, which is both telling and quite sensible.  Telling, because if you thought that was a valid position on behalf of the working men and women of Britain, you would surely put your name to it.  Sensible, since not doing so denies employers the ability t...

With the reopening process well underway in all 50 states, employers are implementing a variety of plans, policies, and protocols to minimize the potential for employee transmission of the coronavirus in the workplace. These plans – discussed in our Employer’s Guide to Return-to-Work Issues – include making physical changes to the workplace, rearranging employee schedules, and other infection-mitigation measures. As part of these new protocols, many employers also are mandating that employees wear face coverings in the workplace, as well as practice, and adhere to, the now familiar six-feet-of-separation social distancing guidelines. However, a vocal segment of our population find public health measures like social distancing to be unnecessarily restrictive, or even a violation of constitutional rights, and that requirements to wear face coverings infringe on personal freedoms. So, what if you are an employer and have implemented a COVID-19 return-to-work protocol whic...

On top of the flexible working rules (see Parts 1-3), another piece of existing law likely to get a pandemic-related dusting-off in the months to come is our old friend whistleblowing. If you face what is otherwise a fairly clear redundancy situation because Covid-19 has gutted your employer’s market, what better way of upping the ante than to assert that your selection is retaliation for complaints you have made about the inadequacy of your employer’s health and safety measures?  In a stroke, you can side step both the requirement of two years’ service before you can claim unfair dismissal, and/or the cap on compensation if you do. Well yes, sometimes.  But it is both harder for the employee to make a protected disclosure than it sounds and easier for the employer to dodge the bullet in its response than you might think. Blowing the whistle at law requires you to do more than air unspecific reservations about your employer’s approach to the virus....