Rojgar Job News

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...

What makes an employee file a lawsuit? Or what makes an employee give an employer the benefit of the doubt? I think about this question sometimes in the middle of lawsuits. I try to figure out what went wrong in the relationship between the employer and the employee. After all, at some point, both thought that they were in for a long relationship together. Both had big hopes and dreams. Somewhere the relationship went off track. The answers as to what that happens are normally complicated; it’s typically a variety of things, sometimes small, that when taken together lead to a falling out. I’m struck by those little details that people remember years later. The forgotten “thank you”.  Or the employer that remembers that the employee left early on a March Madness weekend before a big deal was supposed to close. On the flip side, though, some employers escape such a fate often times by doing the little things that people remember in an employee’s (or empl...

Six months after a little-noticed bill passed unanimously by the General Assembly (and was then vetoed by Governor Lamont), a new compromise measure passed yesterday in a special session.  For a full article, check out CT Mirror’s coverage here or CTNewsJunkie here. The bill uses some of the same concepts that had been previously discussed, particularly at a public hearing in October. But the bill tries to address the issue in a more nuanced way. Perhaps the biggest concession that was made is that existing class actions on wage and hour laws challenging the so-called “dual duties” regulation may proceed though with limits. You can read the bill here. Governor Lamont has indicated that he will sign the measure.  Here are the other key provisions: The biggest takeaway is that the bill requires the Department of Labor to revisit a 1950 regulation that has been interpreted by some as requiring time that a server spends on “non-service duties...