Massachusetts Employment Law Blog

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…

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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Workers in New York City gained strong sick leave protection after 2014. The Earned Sick Time Act began on April 1, 2014. The rule stops companies from firing staff for taking sick days. This law covers all workers including exempt roles. Executives, managers, and professionals get the same 40-hour yearly leave option. Paid and Unpaid…

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). International Shareholder Services Inc. updated how it calculates the Relative Degree of Alignment (RDA). RDA measures CEO pay and performance against peer…