Legal & Legislative Issues

As corporate health insurance costs continue to rise across the nation, more employers are rewarding employees for their healthy behaviors and penalizing employees who fail to lead healthy lifestyles. Because healthier employers tend to miss less days of work and draw less on company health insurance plans, employers are turning to wellness programs to help them reduce health care costs and boost employee productivity.

Biotech companies face unique tensions and challenges that are often not as pronounced in companies in other industries, because many biotech companies start out as small start ups that lack an HR or legal department. Their primary source of employees in many cases consists of foreign born workers and H-1B visa holders who may not have a firm grasp of existing US harassment and discrimination laws. As such, many biotech firms face a high risk of employment litigation, because no matter how small a firm is, it is still bound to comply with state and federal employment laws.

The United States Senate has failed to overcome a Republican led filibuster on a bill that would have made it easier for employees that are victims of pay discrimination to sue their employers.

The bill seeks to change the existing rules for filing pay discrimination suits, which currently require victims of pay discrimination to sue within 180 days of discovering the discrimination, regardless of how long the action affects their pay from its discovery.

Employers sometimes reward workers who quit smoking while others fire them if they can’t. To eliminate the drama, companies are beginning to shy away from hiring smokers at all.

More than half of the 50 states have made it illegal to discriminate against smokers who smoke on their own time.

Private business may be the biggest benefactor of a recent U.S. Supreme Court case involving public education.

Attorney Andrew B. Prescott, of the Providence, R.I. law firm of Nixon Peabody, LLP, said that the case, which was centered on the issue of racial diversity, could mean a great deal to private business.

The House recently passed a provision that would make companies give more notice to employees prior to layoffs.

The reauthorization of the Trade Adjustment Assistance program included amendments to a nearly 20-year-old law that initially established the facility-closing warning requirements. It expands the warning period companies have to give employees when their jobs are about to end from 60 days to 90 days.

An Oklahoma law has been overturned that would have allowed employees to keep guns in parked cars on company property.

The judge said that federal law requires employers to "abate hazards in their workplaces that could lead to death or serious bodily harm" - including the prevention of gun-related workplace injuries.

Sexual discrimination, while still a part of today's business world, is on the decline.

It's been more than four decades since sexual discrimination became a federal law and at least two decades since the majority of companies initiated programs to prevent it from happening.

There is a fine line between hiring a staff because of the way the people look and hiring them because they're qualified.

Restauranteurs, hoteliers and nightclub owners are infamous for doing anything to get an edge. Hiring employees that look as if they have stepped straight off the pages of a fashion magazine is not a new trick, but it doesn't make it less risky.

After being fired due to a random drug test, a North Carolina man filed a lawsuit based on what he believes to be slander.

Mervyn D. Losing was rehired by the grocery store after the store found his test result to be a false positive.