Massachusetts Employment Law Blog

A case spanning seven years that sought to end discrimination in the Fire Department of New York (FDNY), will be settled for $98 million. A black firefighters’ group alleged that the FDNY’s hiring practices were biased against minorities. As a result of the settlement, over 1,500 FDNY applicants will share $98 million covering lost medical…

President Obama recently signed an Executive Order creating a new minimum wage for over two million Federal Contractors. The new minimum wage is $10.10 per hour and will take effect on January 1, 2015. In general, the Executive Order covers those who provide a “service” to the federal government, but it does not cover those…

Hot on the heels of his proposal to raise minimum wage for federal contractors to $10.10, President Obama is planning new overtime laws that will force businesses to pay overtime to more workers. The new regulations will make employees who are wrongly classified as “executive” or “professional” eligible for overtime. The President hopes to stop…

A new CareerBuilder survey asked 2,201 hiring managers and HR professionals to identify the best and worst resume terms.  Here’s what they found: The Worst The following terms were selected as uninviting resume terms: The Best However, employers also identified several key terms and strong verbs that hiring managers look for in resumes: The survey…

Five years since the Fair Pay Act, women still make just seventy-seven cents for every dollar a man earns for performing the same job according to the Department of Labor. In 2009, President Obama passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act promising equal pay for equal work. However, women are still are paid considerably less…

A recent survey found that 80% of employers will Google job seekers before inviting them to an interview.  Your resume and references alone are no longer enough.  Now a quick name search has become routine, and current employers are keeping tabs, too. Although not everyone will have a glowing newspaper article about them, something as…

Philip is representing Dr. Kimberly Theidon, a professor at Harvard University, in a Title IX case against the school. Theidon was seemingly denied tenure after supporting students who were victims of sexual assault at the university. This follows a wave of cases nationwide involving the mishandling of sexual assault cases by universities and colleges. You…

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Employees in New York City cannot be fired for taking a day off because of sickness. From April 1, 2014, employees working in New York City for a company that employs five or more people are entitled to paid sick leave. Employees who work for a company that employs fewer than five people are still…

ISS (International Shareholder Services Inc.) has released its 2014 U.S. Policy updates, with a modification to the executive compensation section, changing the methodology of how they calculate the Relative Degree of Alignment (RDA). The RDA evaluates executive pay and performance relative to peers. Under the revised methodology, ISS will calculate the difference between the company’s…