I can’t bring myself to say something quippy or clever about this …Tyson Foods ordered employees to report for work while supervisors privately wagered money on the number of workers who would be sickened by the deadly [COVID-19] virus Sworn statements in a wrongful death lawsuit tied to COVID-19 infections in a Waterloo pork processing …
Read More “Bet The Company”
With all of the uncertainty over re-opening businesses, you might be tempted to ask your employees and customers to sign a COVID-19 waiver before you let them return inside your buildings. Don’t do it. Proving someone did or didn’t contract the novel coronavirus from any particular location or person is extremely difficult. But what isn’t …
Read More “Waive(r)ing a Red Flag”
Besides it being immensely bad for public relations, attempting to offset your company’s expenses by docking your employees’ wages when their coronavirus stimulus checks arrive is a violation of Michigan’s wage & hours laws.
All companies employing 500 (or fewer) employees must post this poster by April 1st. If you have employees working from home, you should send a copy of the PDF of the poster to those employees. Send the poster as a PDF attachment with the email set for “request a delivery receipt” and “request a read …
Read More “Required US-DOL Poster for Coronavirus Paid Sick and Family Leave”
I recently visited a doctor that I hadn’t seen in a while. And so, of course, was asked to fill out a whole new set of patient paperwork. The office understood that HIPAA requires a patient’s annual consents as far as who (besides the patient) can have access to the patient’s medical records. What the …
Read More “Open Up and Say “Ahhh yi yi””
USCIS is purging all E-Verify records that are more than 10 years old. E‑Verify employers have until Dec. 31, 2019, to download your case information from the Historic Records Report for all of your E-Verify cases that were created on or before Dec. 31, 2009. Why should you care? Because the government can still audit …
Read More “Download Your E-Verify Records Before They’re Gone”
The threshold for “exempt” employees — meaning, those who are not eligible for overtime — moves from $23k/yr to $34k/yr on January 1st, 2020. You may have formerly salaried employees who are back to needing to clock their time because of your need to track overtime. Clocking time may seem like a status hit to …
Read More “It’s All in the Flux”
Seemingly every day, there’s new of another data breach. Small to mid-sized businesses are being actively targeted by bad actors. Thinking that you and your company are too small for a coordinated attack is exactly the kind of complacency that hackers rely upon. To force us to help ourselves, federal and state governments have been …
Read More “HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, and the Alphabet Soup of Data”
The best way to make sure your business never gets fined for a Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA”) violation? Just pick up the phone and dial the digits using your fingers. Then use your own voice to talk to the person who answers. And, of course, before you do either of those things, you should …
Read More “Just Pick Up the Phone”
As Yoga Berra said it’s like deja vu all over again Back in mid-2016, the US Dept of Labor under President Obama proposed that workers making less than about $50k/yr should get overtime. Those proposed rules were then put on hold by a federal judge in Texas back in January 2017. President Trump’s DOL has now proposed …
Read More “Overtime Redux, Redone Yet Again”