Publications

By Michael Homans   For reasons that remain a mystery to labor and employment lawyers, many sophisticated employers continue to believe that inside sales representatives can be treated as salaried employees, exempt from overtime pay laws. Peloton Interactive, Inc., maker of the wildly popular interactive stationary exercise bikes and related products, learned the hard way […]

By Michael Homans The stunning news earlier this month that a Delaware Court of Chancery judge rescinded Elon Musk’s whopping $56 billion compensation package because it failed an “entire fairness review” offers warning signs for other corporations and their directors about when exorbitant executive pay may be problematic. First, the court noted that Musk was

By Michael Homans Transgender rights have been much in the news lately and are starting to hit court dockets.  A “Jane Doe” nurse has sued Philadelphia’s Maplewood Nursing Home in the U.S. District Court here, claiming she was fired for objecting to misgendering by trainers there. Doe states in the lawsuit, filed in January, that

By Michael Homans   Employers have faced an escalating array of claims of religious rights by employees objecting to Covid vaccination requirements. And surely in the 2024 election campaigns we’ll hear more about what the government did right or wrong in responding to the pandemic. Employees at AstraZeneca Pharmaceutical.took their assertion of religious rights to

By Robin Bond Salary.com reports that US employers plan to increase salaries an average of 3% in 2024.  Employers who have to make market/equity pay adjustments are predicting an additional 0.5% increase for that purpose. SHRM has confirmed that employers in the U.S. plan to raise their compensation budgets for merit increases by 3.5% for

By Robin Bond   We often represent employees who are the subject of an internal investigation at work.  Regrettably, we find that the process often is not objective and unbiased, but rather a way for the employer to justify taking pre-determined adverse action against the employee.  A recent Philadelphia jury verdict shows how dangerous –

Things got uncomfortable at Penn State University’s on-campus hotel when a dishwasher there informed a married co-worker that she was pregnant with his baby, according to a complaint filed recently in federal court in Harrisburg, Doe v. Pennsylvania State University. The co-worker began pressuring her to get an abortion, called her a “wh-re,” and harassed her

New York City remains at the vanguard of prohibiting newly recognized forms of discrimination, recently enacting an ordinance that prohibits employers and others from discriminating on the basis of weight and height. NYC also recently joined a growing “mane-stream” of jurisdictions prohibiting hair discrimination.The NYC ordinance on weight and height became law at the end

The U.S. Supreme Court issued several blockbuster decisions in the past month, so you may be forgiven if you missed Groff v. DeJoy, which raised the burden on employers when a worker requests a reasonable accommodation based on religion.In Groff, which started with a lawsuit in federal court in Philadelphia, an evangelical Christian sued the

As published in The Legal Intelligencer.  Back in the 1980s and 1990s a generation of older managers and lawyers hoped that if they ignored computers and email, the latest technologies might just fade away and not affect them. That generation kept their IBM Selectric typewriters humming, their mimeograph machines rolling and their paper files bulging. Meanwhile,