— Employee Rights Category Archives — Page 2 of 4 — Dallas Employment Lawyer Blog Published by Dallas, Texas Employment Lawyers

Welcome to the Era of Salary Transparency

November 10, 2022 | Haylie Davis

FFAD29BD-DCBE-46B6-9955-05B9B7DCBA83-200x300 Have you heard it’s “taboo” to talk about your salary? Us too. Well, that is out the window now. Welcome to the era of salary transparency. Yes, we know it can be awkward to talk about salary, but with new laws on the horizon, it may be a little easier to figure out how much your co-workers are getting paid.

Recently, the New York City Council passed a law requiring employers in New York City with four or more employees to list the minimum and maximum salary on all job posting including ads, promotions, and transfer opportunities. This law applies to any position that can or will be performed, in whole or in part, in New York City. This affects remote listings, meaning any job that could conceivably be done in New York City must follow this.

So why did the New York City Council deem this necessary? They passed this law to try and fight against big pay gaps, specifically between genders as well as between majority and minority racial groups. Let’s be honest, pay matters. It affects where you work and how long you decide to stay there.

What are my options if my employer forces me into court far from home?

August 18, 2022 | Austin Campbell

Dallas Employment Trial Lawyer Austin Campbell

Summary: This article discusses some strategies, including different contract clauses, that employers might use to try to control where you can sue them, or to try to sue you in a far-away place.

If you are in a legal dispute with your employer, where the lawsuit is filed can make a big difference. That affects who the judge is or who might be on the jury. Exactly where a lawsuit can be filed depends on the nature of the legal claims in it. However, two basic principles generally apply. If there are multiple permissible options of where to file suit, the party filing suit gets to choose where to file suit. However, the location must be somewhere that has “personal jurisdiction” over the defendant—i.e., the defendant has to have sufficient connections to the location for it to be legally “fair” to sue them there. This article, however, explores ways that employers may try to get around these basic principles through contracts containing “forum selection” or “venue selection” clauses.

The Truth Will Not Hurt You!

August 12, 2022 | Deontae Wherry

Dallas Employment Lawyer Deontae Wherry

Searching for a job in today’s job market can be a tedious and competitive process. Employers are adding more requisites and qualifications to job postings in an attempt to attract the best candidate. That, in turn, requires candidates to find ways to better market themselves, including sometimes exaggerating their skills and qualifications on their resume and application or misrepresenting why they left their last employer. Let me warn you—don’t misrepresent your qualifications or the reason you left your employer. If a job is meant for you, the job will be for you.

How can a misstatement on an application affect you in an employment case?

Tuesdays should be the New Monday

June 23, 2022 | Paige Melendez

Dallas Employment Lawyer Paige Melendez

The newest shockwave to hit employment customs is the murmurs of a four-day workweek. In fact, Iceland recently declared their experiment with the four-day workweek a success. Belgian workers won the right to a four-day workweek in February, and the United Kingdom has set up a trial run that began this month with about 70 companies volunteering. Further, other countries are looking at the European peninsula to see how their experiment goes to consider instituting the shortened workweek. So, how could we get a four-day workweek in the United States?

The first way is obvious but unlikely. Either the House or Senate would have to draft a bill that mandated a four-day workweek for all businesses. Then, the bill would go to the opposite chamber of Congress before a final agreed upon draft was sent and signed by the President. The chance of a bill of this magnitude, with the potential to cause ripples throughout all levels of industry and business, wading through the stagnant pond of Congress is low, so we turn to a second method.

A false dawn for unions in 2022?

June 16, 2022 | Austin Campbell

Dallas Employment Trial Lawyer Austin Campbell

Summary: This article touches on some of the complex issues surrounding the apparent boom in unionization—will this be a sea change or just temporary? What are the implications of recent union victories in major multinational companies?

There have been high-profile union victories in the news lately for the employees of major multinational companies, particularly Amazon and Starbucks. The National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”), which oversees union elections and investigates “unfair labor practice” claims, has also gone to bat recently against those same companies for numerous allegedly unlawful tactics they engaged in during union elections. It could be that unions are on the verge of a renaissance in the face of the “great resignation” causing a shift in the power dynamics between employees and employers. Indeed, unions are more popular with the public now than they have been in generations.

Job Burnout is Real. Just Ask Facebook.

June 9, 2022 | Rob Wiley, P.C.

Dallas Employment Lawyer Fadi Yousef

Earlier this month, Sheryl Sandberg announced her resignation from Facebook parent Meta Platforms, Inc. Her departure was a surprise to many people. Ms. Sandberg was the Chief Operating Officer of one of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world. She was the primary reason why Facebook scaled from a company with $153 million in revenue and 500 employees in 2007 to its current size, with more than 77,000 employees.

This past week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Ms. Sandberg decided to leave Meta after a years-long process of battling job burnout. She felt like she had become a punching bag for the company’s problems and that she was targeted in a way that would not happen to a man, according to the Journal. This caused Ms. Sandberg to become disconnected from the business and less visible publicly.

The limits of the duty to preserve evidence in Texas

April 14, 2022 | Austin Campbell

Dallas Employment Trial Lawyer Austin Campbell

This article gives a brief overview of when and to whom a duty to preserve evidence applies under Texas law, and discusses why it is usually important to clearly put your employer on notice as soon as possible if you have a legal claim against it.

Many times when someone first hires a lawyer to pursue an employment claim, they ask about getting information or evidence from the employer. Despite how the media present things, there generally is no legal requirement for an employer to turn over any information whatsoever to a current or former employee, even under threat of a lawsuit. Texas rules generally allows so-called “pre-suit discovery” in limited circumstances, like to preserve information or testimony that might otherwise be lost (for example, by the death of a witness).

It’s My Spouse, I’m Leaving

April 8, 2022 | Deontae Wherry

Dallas Employment Lawyer Deontae Wherry

In 1993, Congress passed the Family Medical Leave Act (“FMLA”) which provides employees the right take medical leave for (1) the birth of a child or to bond with a child, (2) the placement of a child for adoption or foster care, (3) a serious health condition that prevents the employee from his or her job, and (4) the care of the employee’s spouse, son, daughter, or parent who has a serious health condition. In this article, I will focus on the definition of “spouse”, the expanded definition, and highlight FMLA’s key provisions.

“Spouse” was initially based upon the traditional definition of marriage being between a husband and a wife. Put simply, a spouse was only a person who was married to a person of the opposite sex. As society continued to change, this impacted many employees’ ability to care for their significant other or spouse. For example, employers were not required to return the employee to his/her position and could retaliate against them if the employee requested medical leave to care for a person of the same sex with a serious health condition because this was not a FMLA qualifying reason.

Ramadan 2022 is Here: Do I Qualify for a Religious Accommodation?

March 31, 2022 | Rob Wiley, P.C.

The Muslim holy month of Ramadan is observed by 1.6 billion people around the world. Practicing Muslims will be fasting from dawn until dusk (approximately 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.) beginning on April 2, 2022 and ending on May 2, 2022. Fasting means no food or liquid of any kind. Yes, that includes water! Ramadan is meant to be a time of spiritual discipline – of deep contemplation of one’s relationship with God, extra prayer, increased charity and generosity, and intense study of the Quran. It is a joyous month meant to be shared and celebrated with loved ones.

Fasting during Ramadan is one of the five pillars – or duties – of Islam, along with the testimony of faith, prayer, charitable giving, and making a pilgrimage to Mecca. The practice of fasting is intended to be a reminder of human frailty and dependence on God for sustenance. It reduces the distractions of life to allow time to focus on our relationship with God. Importantly, it provides an example of the hunger and thirst the poor experience, which is intended to encourage empathy for and charity to the less fortunate.

During Ramadan, it is not unusual for Muslims to be up past midnight for prayer and then get up around 5 a.m. to eat the first meal of the day, which must last until sunset. This means lots of high-protein food and drinking as much water as possible until dawn, after which we cannot eat or drink anything. At dawn, Muslims will perform their first prayer of the day, followed by four additional mandatory prayers throughout the day and an optional late-night prayer, which is typically only preformed during Ramadan. Many Muslims, myself included, are typically more devoted to their prayers during this month and try to set time aside throughout their day to timely complete each of the five scheduled daily prayers. For me, that means blocking time on my work calendar to ensure I am not scheduled for meetings or appointments during the various prayer times that fall within work hours.

Why Judicial Elections Matter in 2022

March 10, 2022 | Austin Campbell

Dallas Employment Trial Lawyer Austin Campbell

Summary: This article gives a rundown of judicial elections in Texas: what they are, what positions are up for a vote, and why you should care about them.

Although many states elect at least some of their judges, as of 2020 Texas is one of only six states to run partisan (party-based) elections for all state judicial positions. If you were one of the 17 percent of Texans who voted in the March primary for the 2022 midterm elections, like me you probably encountered several pages of candidates for all sorts of judicial positions in your county and across the state. All kinds of judges, justices—and something called a “justice of the peace”? Some of the candidates were unopposed in their primaries and might even run unopposed in the general election, while other races had 3 or 4 candidates competing. Perhaps the information overload of all these judicial elections is one reason for Texas’s incredibly low primary turnout.