Massachusetts Employment Law Blog

hilip Gordon, together with Elizabeth Rodgers of Rodgers, Powers & Schwartz LLP, is leading a Title IX lawsuit against Harvard University. They represent Dr. Kimberly Theidon, an accomplished anthropology professor at Harvard University who has seemingly been denied tenure for supporting students who were victims of sexual assault and critical of Harvard’s approach to their…

Last Wednesday April 9th, saw the House Republicans vote against the Paycheck Fairness Act—a bill proposed to achieve equal pay. This was the third time the bill had been blocked. The bill specifically intends to shorten the number of reasons a company can cite for paying women less than men. As we wrote about in…

Starting today, the New York City Sick Leave Law states that employees working more than 80 hours per calendar year are entitled to receive sick leave for the care of themselves or family members. The law includes domestic workers, which are individuals who work inside their employer’s home caring for children, or performing housekeeping duties. Relatives of…

Lena J. Weiner from HealthLeaders Media interviewed Philip for an article discussing whether healthcare workers should be tested for nicotine (March 24, 2014) (View Article)

New York City will settle a seven-year discrimination lawsuit against the Fire Department of New York for $98 million. A Black firefighters’ group claimed the department used biased hiring practices. The case argued that written exams unfairly blocked minority applicants. More than 1,500 applicants will split the settlement. The payout includes medical costs, back pay,…

Barack Obama signed an executive order to raise the minimum wage for federal contractors. The rule impacts more than two million service-based contract workers. The updated wage is $10.10 per hour and begins on January 1, 2015. The order applies to workers who provide services to the federal government. It excludes workers supplying physical goods.…

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…