California Employment Lawyers Blog

In this week's employment news that our Anaheim employment lawyers have been following, a Disneyland hotel restaurant hostess in Anaheim, California was not allowed to wear her hijab, or headdress, to work and rejected Disney's suggestion that she wear a revised costume including a head-covering with a hat that better fit the restaurant's image.

Our Orange County employment lawyers have been interested in this case, as we have reported in our blog about lawsuits involving the wearing of hijabs in the workplace before.

According to the news reports, after Disney offered Imane Boudlal a proposal on how to make her hijab to fit Disney's image with a scarf and a hat, Boudlal filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) alleging religious discrimination.

Boudlal, 26, has reportedly worked at the Storytellers restaurant at the Grand Californian hotel for over two years, and this was the seventh time she was sent home from work without compensation because she would not take off her hijab while working. Boudlal claimed that the proposed costume alterations that Disney presented included a scarf with a hat that made fun of her and her religion. Boudlal claims that the point of the hijab is modesty, and a hat would only draw more attention to herself.

Continue reading "Muslim Files EEOC Discrimination Complaint Over Disney's Costume Policy--in Order to Wear Hijab" »

Our Ontario employment attorneys have been following a recent article from the Los Angeles Times, reporting on a class action lawsuit filed by the California Nurses Association (CNA), accusing Sutter Health and their two San Francisco hospitals, California Pacific Medical Center and St. Luke's Hospital, of discriminating against Filipino nurses in the company's hiring practices.

According to the article, Filipino activists from the Bay Area and the CNA officials strongly encouraged the Human Rights Commission in San Francisco to look into the discriminatory allegations, after three former hospital managers from California Pacific claimed that from 2007 to 2009, they were instructed by supervisors to not hire nurses who were Filipino. The CNA also showed records proving that the number of Filipino nurses decreased in 2008 from 65% to a mere 10%.

According to Lillian Galedo, a member of Filipino Advocates for Justice, the hiring discrimination both denied opportunities for Filipino nurses and punished Filipino nurses who were part of the union, and who took a stand against Sutter's plans for cutting important community services.

Sutter officials reportedly stated that CNA's claims did not have merit and were part of an ongoing three year negotiation between the two groups about contracts. Dr. Warren Browner, the chief executive of California Pacific, claims that they have diverse hiring practices based on promoting equal employment, and that although Sutter doesn't track the exact amount of Filipino nurses currently employed, St. Luke's has a slightly higher Asian nurse percentage today, at 66%--more than the percentage from a few years ago, which was 63%.

Continue reading "California Nurses Association Sues Sutter Health For Discriminatory Hiring Practices" »

According to a recent news story that our Carson employment attorneys have been interested in, the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has investigated CenturyLink, a communications company that operates locations in 33 states nationwide, including California, for wage and hour violations.

The initial investigation by the DOL reportedly began in Florida, focusing on employees at a subsidiary company of CenturyLink, and then expanded to include employees from locations nationwide that include California, Colorado, Idaho, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Ohio, and Oklahoma, among other states.

The DOL claims that over a period of ten months, commissions for inside salespeople were not included in the payment, when adding up the wages that employees earned after working more than a 40-hour week.

As our Irvine employment attorneys have reported in a previous blog, the Fair Labor Standards Act states that it is mandatory for employees to receive overtime pay for any hours worked over a 40-hour work week at rates that are no less than one and one-half their regular pay rates. Premium pay must be calculated using both salary and commissions. According to the DOL, the FLSA provides an exemption for overtime and minimum wage payment if the individual is employed in the capacity of an outside salesman, whereas inside salespeople do not have the same exemption.

Continue reading "U.S. Labor Department Forces CenturyLink to Pay Over $140,000 in Back Wages and Overtime" »

As Santa Ana employment lawyers, we have been following the recent wage and hour news that Smartsoft International Inc., a Georgia-based computer consulting company will pay around $1 million in back wages to nonimmigrant, or foreign workers who were employed on a temporary basis with the company under the H-1B visa program.

The H-1B employment program reportedly allows employers to hire foreign, or nonimmigrant workers in occupations that are specialized. The H-1B program establishes standards to protect U.S. workers who are employed in similar jobs, or who have similar qualifications, from being affected in an adverse way by the employment of foreign workers. Employers are required to report to the Labor Department that they will compensate H-1B nonimmigrant workers with wage payment that is at least equal to the actual wages paid to other U.S. employees with similar job qualifications and experience, or to the prevailing wages paid in the geographic location of employment--whichever compensation is greater.

According the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor, Smartsoft violated the H-1B program laws by neglecting to pay some employees any wages at the beginning of their employment, and only paid the employees on a part-time basis, even though they were hired under a full-time agreement. The employees were also reportedly paid less than the prevailing wages in the locations in which they worked and the company agreed to pay back wages and interest to the 135 nonimmigrant workers.

Hilda L. Solis, U.S. Secretary of Labor claimed that the resolution of this case supports the Labor Department's strong commitment to enforce this country's wage and hour laws that protect all workers that are involved in the H-1B program.

Continue reading "Smartsoft Agrees to $1 Million in Back Wages and Interest for H-1B Worker Violations" »

In yesterday's blog, our Ontario employment lawyers discussed the Obama administration's current initiative, to investigate the health care industry's pay practices after discovering that many nursing homes and hospitals are violating wage and hour laws according to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, nursing assistants, cooks and licensed practical nurses as well as other workers within the health care industry are especially vulnerable to wage violations.

The New York Times stated in a recent article, that many health care employees are not being paid for work performed during legally required meal breaks. The Times interviewed Charles D. Boal, a former Western Pennsylvania Hospital registered nurse, working in the critical care unit, who claimed that nurses often give up lunch breaks to make sure the patient is properly cared for. Boal claimed that lunch breaks at the nursing unit were consistently filled with phone calls, talking with doctors and handling family members.

The DOL regulations state that meal periods are not work time and employers are not required to compensate for them. But an employee who is paid hourly must be entirely relieved from work duty during a meal period, and it is a manager's duty to make sure that work is not performed by these employees during meal breaks, unless the employer intends to pay for the work time. In some cases, hospitals reportedly assume that the worker has taken the meal break, and have automatically reduced an employee's compensation by the equivalent of thirty minutes per shift, even when the meal break was interrupted or not taken.

Continue reading "Vulnerable Health Care Industry Workers and Wage and Hour Violations" »

According to a recent article in the New York Times, President Obama and U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) have embarked on an investigation into the pay practices throughout the health care industry after discovering that many nursing homes and hospitals are neglecting to compensate nurses and other employees appropriately, for overtime hours worked beyond a 40-hour week.

As our Orange County employment attorneys reported in a recent blog, after becoming the U.S. Secretary of Labor, Hilda L. Solis embarked on a nationwide campaign to investigate employer wage and hour violations, focusing on low-wage and vulnerable workers. Solis has increased the enforcement staff in all of the agencies within in the Labor Department, which includes the hiring of 250 new field investigators for the Wage and Hour Division.

The DOL claims that nursing assistants, cooks, licensed practical nurses and other employees in the industry are especially vulnerable to wage violations.

As part of the U.S. Labor Department's ongoing fight to make sure employers uphold the Fair Labor Standards Act, by paying employees the minimum wage, as well as one-and-a-half times the employees' regular pay rate for hours worked beyond a 40-hour week, hospitals across the country have reportedly paid hefty sums in government and employees claim settlements, that total back pay in the millions.

Continue reading "U.S. DOL Investigates Wage and Hour Practices in the Health Care Industry" »

Our Santa Ana employment lawyers have been following the recent announcement by the U.S. Justice Department, of a consent decree that resolves a Ventura County, California lawsuit that we discussed recently in a blog. The suit accused the county of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) after a woman was allegedly refused employment because she is deaf and needs to be provided with reasonable accommodations.

In 2005, the job applicant reportedly applied for a position working in social services for children. When she applied, she had already been employed by Los Angeles County in a similar position successfully for over eight years. In her initial interview, the applicant was reportedly given high ratings, and asked appropriate job-related questions. In the second interview, a different interviewer focused on her disability, and whether this hearing impairment and the need for a sign language interpreter would interfere with her ability to provide children with social services. The applicant reportedly responded that as long as she was reasonably accommodated with the help of hearing aids and an interpreter, she would be able to excel in the job. She was not hired for the job, and according to the lawsuit filed by the DOJ, the applicant was not hired because of her disability, and therefore subjected to disability discrimination.

Under the terms of the consent decree, Ventura County will properly train the supervisory staff in charge of firing and promotion decisions to make sure that disabled applicants who are qualified, and disabled employees will be provided with reasonable accommodations, including interpreters where necessary, to ensure equal employment opportunities. Ventura County has also agreed to pay a total of $45,000 in damages.

The ADA was created to protect disabled applicants and employees from this kind of discrimination. According to Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, the ADA prohibits employers from hiring on the basis of stereotypes about an employee's job future performance due to a disability or on the cost involved in providing reasonable accommodations for the disability.

Continue reading "DOJ Disability Discrimination Lawsuit Against Ventura County Resolved" »

In yesterday's blog, our Anaheim employment attorneys reported on how the company tactic of screening out job applicants with bad credit or criminal records from the hiring process could potentially discriminate against Hispanic and black workers and violate employment law regulated by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

In a California lawsuit filed last month, Adrienne Hudson, a 44-year old single mother, claims she was fired from her new job as a bus driver after the company, First Transit, discovered that she was convicted of welfare fraud seven years ago.

Hudson has sued the company for discrimination, claiming that the hiring practices discriminate against black and Hispanic job applicants who have far more arrests and convictions than whites. Hudson, who is black, claims that people make mistakes, and that if corrected, those mistakes should not be punished in the future, outside of the courtroom.

Last year, the EEOC sent a serious warning to employers across the country when the commission filed a class-action lawsuit against the Dallas-based events planning firm, Freeman Companies, accusing the company of discriminating against males, blacks and Hispanic job applicants, based on criminal records and credit history.

Continue reading "California Worker Sues for Job-screening Discrimination" »

According to a recent Associated Press article, that our Anaheim, California employment lawyers have been following, certain reports used by companies to screen out job applicants with bad credit or criminal records could interfere with anti-discrimination laws, the government is discovering as it continues to analyze hiring policies that could discriminate against Hispanic and black workers.

The U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission, the agency that enforces this country's laws on employee discrimination in regard to recruiting, hiring, and advancement, claims that a broad refusal to hire workers based on their credit problems or criminal records can be against the law if it has a disparate impact on racial minorities. An exception to this rule, is if the company can show the practice is job-related and "consistent with business necessity."

According to the EEOC, millions of people who have criminal records are having a difficult time finding work, possibly resulting from companies having easy access to information, because of online database growth, and a booming background check industry. More companies are reportedly trying to also screen out applicants who have bankruptcies, credit problems, or any court judgments--issues that have been rapidly increasing as a result of the recession.

Most companies reportedly see background checks as a way to sort through for ideal candidates to keep a safe work environment and to prevent the possibility for negligent hiring claims.

Continue reading "Certain Job-screening Tactics Could be Against the Law" »

In recent California wage and hour news that our Newport Beach employment attorneys have been following, Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed legislation recently that would have changed wage and hour pay regulations for agricultural workers.

The legislation, known as the Senate Bill 1121, reportedly would have required that agriculture employees in California who work over eight hours in a day or 40 hours in a week receive overtime benefits, which would have made California the only state in this country mandating these overtime regulations for farm workers.

Many farm groups reportedly welcomed the veto, including the California Farm Bureau Federation (CFBF), claiming that the legislature would have reduced wages for individual farm workers and would have complicated work for family farmers and ranchers. The CFBF joined around 30 business and agricultural groups, protesting the bill that was authored by California Senator Dean Florez (D-CA). Over 10,000 agricultural workers in California also vetoed the bill by signing a petition that was sent to the governor. California reportedly employs around 450,000 workers in peak harvest months like August and September.

According to Paul Wenger, President of the CFBF, farm work is not like other employment, due to seasons and fickle weather issues that can unexpectedly disrupt an employee's schedule. Many farm groups claimed that with the bill, if overtime compensation was required after working for eight hours, individual farm employees would lose hours and pay, as additional harvest crews would need to be hired for shorter shifts, resulting in lower take-home pay for all workers. Another argument against the bill was that work would need to be rescheduled due to the overtime.

Continue reading "California Overtime Bill for Farmers and Workers Vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger" »

As Carson, California wage and hour attorneys, we have been following the recent news release by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) that a Texas construction company and subcontractor must pay around $137,000 in back wages to 140 former and current workers, after a DOL investigation found that the company was violating the Fair Labor Standards Act, (FLSA), the Davis-Bacon Act (DBA), and the Contract Work Hours and Safety Standards Act (CWHSSA).

According to the DOL, the construction workers were performing work in Dallas, on the Margaret Hunt Hill bridge project. After an investigation of Williams Brothers Construction, based in Houston, the DOL found that the company neglected to properly compensate overtime hours to workers who were employed on the Texas Department of Transportation contracts that were receiving funding from the federal government. The companies also reportedly failed to pay overtime for safety bonuses, violating the FLSA.

After investigating Cimolai USA and Cosme, the subcontractors, the DOL found that Cimolai neglected to pay two non-exempt salaried employees overtime compensation for over $950 --violating the FLSA. Cosme was found owing 16 workers over $34,000 in overtime back pay. The workers were paid less than the DBA prevailing rates, and reportedly should have been paid time and one-half, as mandated by the CWHSSA.

Workers who are employed on federal contracts, according to the CWHSSA, must receive time and one-half in compensation, if they work any hours beyond a workweek of 40 hours. Workers under the CWHSSA must also receive the designated health and welfare benefits they are entitled to receive. The DBA reportedly requires employers to compensate workers the minimum hourly wage and in addition, a health and welfare benefit amount that is specified in the work contract.

Continue reading "Construction Company Pays Back Wages After DOL Wage and Hour Division Probe" »

In recent employment news that our Santa Ana, CA employment attorneys have been following, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), part of the U.S Department of Labor's (DOL), has fined Cooperative Plus, Inc., a cooperative owned by farmers in Wisconsin, $721,000, for failing to have proper equipment and procedures, that lead to exposing employees to the dangerous possibility of being suffocated or engulfed in storage bins of grain.

Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, employers are legally responsible for providing a safe and healthy work environment for their employees. In February of this year, a worker from Cooperative Plus, Inc., became entrenched in soybeans that were frozen and came up to worker's chest-level. The worker reportedly barely escaped death, after a rescue mission that took four hours.

According to Purdue University researchers, 38 entrapments in grain were documented in 2009. OSHA claims that grain entrapments occur as a result of employer negligence, violation of OSHA standards, and a lack of proper safety and health practices.

Secretary of Labor, Hilda L. Solis, claims that Cooperative Plus disregarded the safety standards that have long been in place to protect employees in the operations of grain handling, by knowingly exposing the worker to the possibility of suffocation and near death. Solis claimed that when employers disregard workplace standards it places American workers in grave danger, and the DOL will not tolerate such violations.

Continue reading "Cooperative Fined $721,000 by OSHA after Worker Becomes Engulfed in Frozen Soybeans" »

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the first comprehensive federal civil rights act for disabled people, on July 26th, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger directed his Administration to ensure that accommodation guidelines are available for California state employees with disabilities, by issuing Executive Order S-11-10.

Under Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, private employers, employment agencies, local and state governments, and labor unions are prohibited from engaging in discrimination against qualified disabled individuals in hiring, firing, job advancement, job application compensation, employment training, and other employment terms, conditions, and privileges.

With this Executive Order, each department, agency, commission board and office under the Governor's authority, is directed to establish or review its ADA reasonable accommodation guidelines, in order to ensure that managers and supervisors have the necessary information to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities with efficiency and in a timely manner.

The Governor also reportedly ordered the Department of General Services and the Department of Rehabilitation to collaborate to develop contracts for reasonable accommodation equipment and services to better meet the needs of disabled employees.

Continue reading "California Governor Celebrates 20th Anniversary of ADA with Disability Initiative" »

In recent California employment news that our attorneys at Howard Law, PC have been following, Google Inc. will be heading to court, after the California Supreme Court ruled today that an age-discrimination lawsuit filed by a former employee should go to trial.

According to the lawsuit, Brian Reid, a senior executive at Google, from 2002-2004 was hired because of his high-tech expertise, with a high-profile resume including leading a team that helped with the development of the first Internet firewall software. Reid filed a lawsuit in 2004, claiming that Google violated his employment rights based on the California Fair Employment and Housing Act, by criticizing him based on his age, 54, and telling him upon his termination that he wasn't a good "cultural fit" for the youth-oriented company.

The Wall Street Journal reports that in 2005, the state of California ruled in Google's favor, stating that age-discrimination did not look to be the main factor in termination. Reid appealed, and in 2007, an appeals court did not agree with the previous ruling, stating that there was undisputed evidence that Reid was discriminated against based on his age, and fired as a legitimate result.

The court ruled unanimously that Reid presented enough discriminatory evidence to allow a jury to decide whether his employment was terminated on the basis of age. Among Reid's age-discrimination evidence included derogatory comments from executives who allegedly called him an "old man," and criticized him for having ideas that were "too old to matter." Reid's boss also allegedly sent emails of a discriminatory nature about him to Google's co-founder, Sergey Brin.

Continue reading "Google To Stand Trial--California Age-Discrimination Lawsuit Moves Forward" »