Earlier this month a survey of 400 worldwide C-suite executives was conducted by Herbert Smith Freehills, LLP that found those executives foresee an unprecedented rise in workplace activism. The survey report found executives today are confronting employees articulating their views about not only workplace concerns and issues but on wider social issues. This worker activism is enabled and is consequentially amplified by social media.

Many employers are investing in health programs for their employees. It could be offering to co-pay for a gym membership, providing online health support programs, or providing on-site fitness centers. However, one important health benefit that employers have offered for a long time is vacation time.

ASE recently published the results to its biennial Policies and Practices Survey. Survey results are broken into six major categories and are based on three employer sizes in both the National and Michigan (a subset of the national report) editions. Nearly 100 Michigan employers participated in the 2022 edition, and 189 questions were answered regarding human resource policies and employment practices.

For many employers, their healthcare benefits include access to pregnancy termination procedures, or abortions.  The right to abortions was decided in a 1973 case called Roe v. Wade. The case was controversial for multiple reasons, but the crux of it is that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas statute banning abortion, effectively legalizing the procedure across the United States. Before the decision, abortion had been illegal throughout much of the country forcing many women to...

ASE regularly receives member calls about personnel file management and maintenance. Let’s go over some basic information about record retention and personnel file management.

Spring has sprung, at least by the calendar, which means it is time to hire summer help. Help could come in the form of interns, co-ops, work study programs, or perhaps even just helping a young person with an employment opportunity. What does this mean for employers?

By now most everyone has seen or heard that at the Oscar awards on March 27th actor Will Smith took offense at a joke made by Chris Rock about Smith’s wife. Smith proceeded to walk up on stage and slap (hard) Chris Rock and then yell at him to leave his wife out of his remarks (with expletives) after returning to his seat.

As remote work becomes more ubiquitous as well as advantageous to employers and employees alike, employers are investing in or supporting workers by providing equipment and property to perform work offsite (at home mostly). This property and equipment still may belong to the company, but as inevitably happens at some time, the employer and employee part ways. How should the employer manage the return of their property without causing more of a problem legally speaking?

In ASE’s Designing Employee Handbook class as well as other EPTW articles we tell employers to be careful with limitation of actions clauses. A limitation of actions clause is used to reduce the amount of time an employee has to bring a wrongful employment action against an employer – usually down to just 180 days from the wrongful employment act.

As larger employers wait for the Occupational Safety and Health Agency’s (OSHA) Emergency Temporary Standards (ETS) that will tell them how to compliantly manage mandated vaccinations, many employers are looking to make other constructive changes to their health and safety policies. As a lever to promote voluntary vaccination, some employers have implemented health care “surcharges” on unvaccinated workers.

As we wait for the OSHA guidance detailing how employers (over 100 in employment) can implement mandated vaccination for employees, employers need to keep in mind how they require vaccination and testing may impact proper pay for non-exempt employees.

Last month, the Supreme Court declined to take up the issue of whether the nation's schools must allow students to use the bathroom that matches their gender identities.  In that case, a 4th Circuit Court of Appeals decision, the court ruled in favor of Gavin Grimm, a transgender man who sued his Virginia high school for barring him from using the boys’ restroom.  Grimm stated that “[b]eing forced to use the nurse’s room, a private bathroom, and the girl’s...

In addition to providing an employee valuable information about the company, its rules, benefits, and general practices, employee handbooks include a myriad of important legal compliance statements.  These statements are intended as not only employee notices that may or may not be required by law, but to set up employer affirmative defenses in the event of a wrongful employment action. These policies will generally not keep you out of court but do set up an argument that the company...

A new report from Arizent, The Future of Work: Employers, Employees, and the Long Road to Compromise, reveals that employers and employees don’t agree on what the new normal looks like.  To move forward, each side will have to compromise.

As ASE has written about previously, a vaccine mandate is allowed under law, except in jurisdictions which do not allow it, e.g. Montana. In addition, vaccine mandates in a union environment is still under question as to whether it has to be negotiated.  But employers are not flocking to this mandate.  In a recent ASE survey of 143 Michigan organizations, a majority of those surveyed (74.1%) continue to encourage vaccinations, but not mandate them.  Yet, the Delta variant...