It’s Monday (more likely Friday) and your employer just fired you.  The company put you on a performance improvement plan.  You were harassed and/or discriminated against, again.  You believe your employer should be paying you overtime, but isn’t.  You have an upcoming appointment with a North East Ohio employment lawyer.  What should you do?  What can you expect? Continue reading Fired, Harassed Or Discriminated Against: Making The Most Of Your Meeting With An Employment Lawyer →

You never know where you’ll cross paths with someone who will change your life for the better. Continue reading A Tribute to My Friend Jason →

Before we answer that question, let’s be clear about a few of things: For reasons too numerous to mention, we do not condone calling anyone an MF.  If you do that at work, or anywhere for that matter, it will likely have adverse consequences of one kind or another.  Further, this article is not a primer on how to  m-f your boss and keep your job. The idea, instead, is to show Ohio employers and employees alike how to avoid these types of situations.  Also, the law views these situations differently depending on a number of factors including, whether the events happened in the workplace during working hours, outside the workplace or outside of actual work hours or on social media–as is the case here.  Finally, many employers are subject to federal as well as Ohio labor laws even if they do not have a union or a union organizing drive in progress.

Continue reading I Was Fired For Calling My Boss A “Nasty MF” On Facebook. Can I Get My Job Back? →

The National Labor Relations Board’s decision finding that an employer’s rules prohibiting recordings in the workplace were unlawful is an important one for employers and employees in Northeast Ohio. In Whole Foods Market, Inc., decided in late December 2015, the NLRB struck down the company’s two policies that broadly prohibited recordings without prior approval. The Whole Foods’ human resource executive who drafted the policies testified that those policies applied to all areas of every store, including the parking lot and the area in front of the store. They covered employees and managers alike during “worktime” and prohibited the use of any type of electronic device that could record images or conversations. These policies were very broad indeed.

Under the guise of harmonizing the federal and Ohio discrimination laws, the sponsors of Ohio Senate Bill 268 seek to eliminate certain longstanding civil rights of Ohio’s workers and greatly limit others. Make no mistake, Senate Bill 268 is not reform legislation. Instead, it severely limits and in some instances eliminates an Ohio employee’s ability to hold her or his employer responsible for discrimination, harassment, retaliation, broken promises the employee relied upon, certain contracts and the emotional distress that can result from these types of intentional misconduct in the workplace.