Green Savits Employment Law Blog

In 2010, Congress passed the Dodd Frank Act which in part was designed to expand legal protection to whistleblowing employees of publicly traded companies who disclose, object to or refuse to participate in conduct that violates federal securities laws. On June 26, 2017, the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to decide whether the Dodd Frank Act protects a whistleblowing employee who objects to federal securities laws violations to company management but not to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Thus, the Supreme Court will resolve conflicting rulings...

Prospective clients frequently call our office seeking to pursue legal action because they were terminated while on disability leave. While calling us is certainly the correct first-step in this situation, not all employers violate the law when they terminate an employee who is out on disability leave and the simple fact of receipt of short term disability benefits does not prohibit termination. For example, if an employer is doing a reorganization and your position is legitimately eliminated, you are not protected simply because you are out on disability leave.

The first question to ask in determining whether your employer can...

The May 14, 2017 New York Times Sunday Business Section ran an in-depth feature article exploring how employers are requiring employees more and more to sign non-compete agreements. As the article points out, employers use to reserve the use of non-compete agreements for senior management.  That has changed recently and has spread to the lowest rung employees.  Because court battles over the validity of non-compete agreement require a lot of attorney time, attorneys who represent employees must charge on the hour and most employees cannot afford to pay those fees.  One or two of the employees interviewed in the Times article went bankrupt...

The Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco conducted a study in 2015 how age discrimination affects men and women. Researchers sent out approximately 40,000 applications to employers for 13,000 positions in eleven cities across twelve different states.  The study concluded that older women applying for jobs were 47% more likely to be initially rejected for administrative positions than their younger counterparts.

This study has important implications for proving lost wages and benefits suffered by older women who were illegaly terminated.  Employers often argue that it is too speculative to predict wage and benefit losses into the...