Employment Law & Employment Law Class Actions

The EEOC commission recently issued guidance that urges employers to avoid asking job applicants about criminal convictions on job applications. Doing so, the EEOC explained, could constitute job discrimination, which is a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

The EEOC also made clear that it never considers it appropriate to ask applicants if they have ever been arrested. It says knowing about arrest records is not "consistent with business necessity."

Legal experts from the EEOC caution that if job applications or hiring managers ask about applicants' criminal conviction histories, employers must be able to prove they have a good business reason for seeking the information.

Welcome back. As we began discussing in the last post, statistics show that unpaid overtime claims are on the rise in California and the rest of the nation. Labor experts believe one of the main reasons for this is that employers are trying to get the same amount of work done after 9 million layoffs occurred as a result of the recession.

Ultimately, what is happening is that many employers are misclassifying positions that should be eligible for overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act as exempt to save on labor costs. Other times, employers are pushing their employees to work off-the-clock or transfer their overtime hours from one week to another.

Several truck drivers and forklift operators in the Los Angeles area who were employed by the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group and its affiliated firms have been awarded a total of $17.7 million in damages for age discrimination. The award will be shared by six plaintiff employees.

The plaintiffs testified that Dr Pepper Snapple Group management illegally tampered with performance reviews of older employees, lowering their scores for no other reason than age. The company's prejudice towards the older employees reportedly went so far as to intentionally place them in more difficult assignments in order to get them injured or encourage them to quit.

A unanimous decision by the California Supreme Court found that employers need not insist that workers take their state-sanctioned mandatory lunch breaks. Lawyers for workers argued before the court that California employers engage in widespread abuse of employee rights by not issuing direct orders to take meal breaks.

When busy, conscientious employees may be reluctant to take a lunch break, which results in workers being taken advantage of, attorneys for the employees argued. The lawsuit was originally filed nine years ago against the parent company of Chili's and other restaurants by thousands of workers who said they missed out on breaks required by law.