Labor & Employment Developments Blog

In employment litigation, management witnesses are sometimes reluctant to be forthcoming about business decisions if they perceive that the reasons for a decision might not look good to others.  This kind of thinking often misses the point in employment litigation. 

The Ohio Supreme Court delivered a major victory for employers this week by upholding the constitutionality of Ohio's intentional tort statute. 

There has been a lot of news coverage lately of Rep. Eric Massa’s resignation and apparently related allegations of harassment of male staffers. 

An interesting article from Portfolio.com notes that:

“Lawsuits over overtime, long a bane of big business, are moving their way down the ladder. More such suits are being filed against small and mid-sized businesses, too.” 

The United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday (12/9) in Stolt-Nielsen S.A. v. AnimalFeeds International Corp., an anti-trust case.  The case is of interest to employment law practitioners because the issue under consideration is whether class arbitration may be imposed when that issue is not addressed in the parties’ arbitration clauses. 

Amazon has been hit with a FLSA lawsuit for unpaid overtime based on its practice of rounding employees’ clock-in and clock-out times to the nearest quarter hour.  As is typical, the newspaper account of the lawsuit quotes extensively from the complaint and leaves the impression that Amazon must have done something wrong.  In reality, there is nothing per se wrong with the practice or rounding hours.