Wage theft occurs when an employer fails to comply with wage and overtime laws. These include a guaranteed minimum wage, breaks, and overtime pay when employees work long hours. An employer’s failure to abide by these laws is the same thing as stealing from its employees. Unfortunately, some employers who choose to violate their employees’ wage and overtime rights are good at disguising their misconduct. This makes it difficult for employees to know whey they are getting ripped off. Regardless of whether an employee is classified as “exempt” or makes commissions, California laws are very specific in how much an employee must make in salary, or must make overall with commissions; but for our purposes, know that no employee should be making less than the minimum wage per hour. And this is where employees get trapped: because some employers work these employees such long hours that their average hourly rate per hour comes out to…Read More
You know the difference between right and wrong. It is something inside of you and something you try to instill in your friend, family, and children. Sometimes it’s easy to do the right thing, like pointing that a cashier gave you too much change. But you also know that doing the right thing can be really hard—with very real consequences. An example of this is when you see your employer break the law, or when your employer asks you to break the law. This is a huge ethical dilemma as it challenges your sense of right and wrong, while also putting your job, livelihood, and reputation on the line. California Labor Code Section 1102.5 addresses California employers when it comes to protecting whistleblowers. A “whistleblower” is a person who has a reasonable belief that their employer is violating state or federal laws, or is asking them to violate the law, and reports it to the authorities.…Read More
Domestic violence, sexual violence, and stalking each constitutes a traumatic violation of a person. These criminal violations are life altering and often require victims to take significant time to address through numerous forms of intervention, such as law enforcement involvement, seeking protective orders, relocating, medical assistance, and extensive therapeutic or psychiatric help. Victims need support and deserve respect. What they don’t need is to be subjected to further harm by their own employers. California Law Prohibits Discrimination Against Victims California has some of the country’s strongest employee protections in the Country, and this extends to victim protections. Existing California law prohibits an employer from firing, threatening to fire, demoting, suspending, retaliating against, or “in any manner” discriminating against an employee who has been “a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking for taking time off from work for specified purposes related to addressing the domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking.” The “specified purposes” envisioned in Labor…Read More
