Workplace Privacy

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One of the first cases filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) following its 2012 updated guidance on the use of arrest and conviction records in employment decisions has been resolved. Last month, a federal court in South Carolina approved a settlement in which BMW Manufacturing Co., LLC (BMW) agreed to pay $1.6 million and offer jobs to aggrieved African-American former employees and applicants. BMW had already voluntarily changed its criminal conviction policy.

The EEOC filed suit against BMW in 2013 claiming that BMW’s criminal conviction policy was not job related and consistent with business necessity and disproportionately screened out African Americans from employment. BMW used a contractor to provide logistics services at its facility in South Carolina. The workers who provided services to BMW were subject to criminal background checks consistent with the contractor’s policy, which reviewed only convictions from the prior seven years. When BMW switched contractors, the workers were told that they would need to re-apply for employment with the new contractor, and BMW instructed the new contractor to perform criminal background checks on all workers under BMW’s policy. BMW’s criminal convictions policy had no time limitation, excluding from employment all applicants with convictions in certain categories of crimes without regard to whether the conviction was a misdemeanor or felony, the age of the conviction, or the nature or gravity of the individual crime. One hundred incumbent workers, eighty percent of whom were African American, did not pass BMW’s inflexible criminal background check, including many who had worked for BMW for a number of years. All of these workers were denied employment with the new contractor.Continue Reading The use of criminal background checks to make employment decisions is not without peril

We would like to thank Adam Bennett, one of Porter Wright’s summer law clerks, for his significant contributions to this blog post.

If a recent federal court case is any sign of the times, employers should think twice before engaging in their own forensic crime scene style investigations of employee questionable behavior—even if the employee…

I’m looking forward to joining my colleagues Dennis Hirsch and Jay Levine for a roundtable discussion of “Big data, data analytics and the law: What your company needs to know about the next big thing” on May 13. Here is a glimpse into what I plan to talk about from the employment lawyer’s perspective:

Even if we don’t know exactly how big data works, we know what it can do for us in our daily lives. Movie suggestions on Netflix. Targeted coupons at the grocery store. Cheap airfare and hotel rates. Facebook suggestions of people we may know. There is a certain creepiness to all of this but many (most?) of us seem willing to overlook it for the convenience and opportunities it provides.

Human resources departments now are figuring out how to use big data in the workplace. LinkedIn was one of the first businesses to recognize the value that data held for employers. At its most basic level, LinkedIn can steer its individual members to potentially attractive jobs that fit their profile and, for recruiters, it provides a rich database of candidates, including people who aren’t even looking for a new job. But there are a lot more than just recruiting opportunities. Companies like Knack now promote tests like Wasabi Waiter and Dungeon Scrawl that it claims will reveal job applicants’ talents, traits and skills to permit employers to identify the best candidate for their needs. JP Morgan Chase apparently has developed software that analyzes its own employees’ data to try to identify which ones are most likely to “go rogue,” so it has time to stop them before they do.
Continue Reading Big data in the workplace

We all pretty much know the drill at this point. Organization announces data breach, sends out notices as required under state and/or federal law to those individuals that are affected, offers some kind of identity theft protection or credit monitoring service, awaits public criticism and backlash. The NLRB and the American Postal Workers Union (“AWPU”)…

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has now brought its first whistleblower enforcement action against a publicly traded company under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 for utilizing an overly broad employee confidentiality agreement. Specifically, the SEC alleges that KBR, Inc., has violated the Act by implementing employee confidentiality agreements that “potentially discouraged” employees from…

Back in the 1960’s, legendary bluesman Muddy Waters wrote a song called “You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had.”

Now, it is Sony Pictures that is singing the blues, as damages continue to mount following the cyber attack on its data networks just before Thanksgiving. A shadowy group with possible connections to the North…

Saman Rajaee was a salesman for Design Tech Homes. He used his personal iPhone to connect to his employer’s Microsoft Exchange Server, which allowed him to access his work-related email, contacts and calendar from his phone. Design Tech did not have a BYOD policy. When Rajaee’s employment terminated, Design Tech remotely wiped his phone, which…

Recent multi-million dollar settlements highlight the importance for employers of complying with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). They also highlight that, when it comes to class action lawsuits in the employment-law context, the FCRA is the new FLSA!

The FCRA has very specific requirements employers must comply with if they engage a background check…

There seems to be a news story every day detailing employee misuse of social media. In fact, in a recent survey released by Proskauer Rose LLP, more than 70 percent of the 110 businesses surveyed reported they had to take disciplinary action against employees for misusing the technology.

Living in the U.S.A., we have…