Many people who stay in hotels, even very expensive luxury hotels, will leave all kinds of trash for housekeepers to deal with. According to a recent news article from NBC Los Angeles, this often includes medical waste that must be specially handled and safely disposed of in an approved receptacle. While the hotel…
Chicken doesn’t come cheap. Or at least, not for the workers who toil to process it for the masses. A new report by Oxfam America asserts workers in U.S. poultry processing plants risk high rates of injury, illness, difficult working conditions and unsympathetic bosses. But perhaps the worst offense, the…
A $57,500 settlement was reached in an Orange County gender discrimination lawsuit in which plaintiff, an employee of Irvine Range Water District, alleged she suffered system sexism by her superiors. Although the settlement agreement did not require the employer to concede any wrongdoing, plaintiff’s complaint asserted there was plenty. According…
A sharply divided California Court of Appeal, Second Appellate District, Division Eight, issued a decision allowing a plaintiff to proceed with his associational disability discrimination claim against his employer. This was a reversal of the trial court’s opinion in Castro-Ramirez v. Dependable Highways Express Inc., wherein a father alleged he was…
A former division chief for the San Bernadino Fire Protection District has been awarded more than $700,000 by a jury in California after successfully arguing he was the victim of age discrimination. Jurors determined age with the “substantial motivating reason” behind the termination of the then-58-year-old fire official. Now 62,…
Assurance of equal pay is an important issue in California and across the country. Before last year, California had one of the toughest equal pay laws on the books. It got even tougher in December when lawmakers passed the California Equal Pay Act, which formally went into effect Jan. 1,…
Amid growing allegations of widespread sexual harassment at the University of California Berkely, California’s top sexual harassment investigator is initiating a comprehensive review of training policies throughout the state. The California Department of Fair Housing, responsible for enforcing the state’s civil rights laws, has created a task force that will…
A woman who practices Catholicism says she was wrongfully terminated from her job at a bottled water company in Nevada because she refused to convert to Scientology. The employment lawsuit asserting religious discrimination alleges the worker was under pressure to watch pro-Scientology videos and was turned down for a pay…
According to a recent news feature from the National Law Review, a new law has taken effect in California that will make some changes to the state’s mandatory sexual harassment education requirement. Specifically, the new law will require employers to have training about topics such as discrimination, sexual harassment, and…
According to a recent news feature from Benefits News, a new labor law taking effect in 2018 will increase the amount of pay for family leave based upon a percentage of their average weekly wages during normal (not overtime) working hours. The state employment law will provide California’s workers with…