Workers at Bank of America’s retail branches and call centers in five states have filed a lawsuit claiming they are due unpaid overtime from the banking giant. The suit, filed in federal district court in Kansas, alleges the bank requires employees to work more than 40 hours per week, but only pays them for 40.

Despite your best efforts, a rogue supervisor occasionally slips through. He may harbor discriminatory attitudes that can color his termination and disciplinary decisions. But you can cut that chain by doing a little independent digging into what really happened. Then document your efforts to get both sides of the story.

Employees who complain about alleged discrimination are protected from retaliation for complaining. That protection, however, isn’t unlimited. There’s a huge difference, for example, between an employee who calmly reports that he has been discriminated against and someone whose complaints sound more like threats of physical harm.

It seems logical enough: Employees shouldn’t be able to sue over promotions they never applied for. But in some cases where positions were never posted, employees have successfully sued, alleging they would have applied had they known there was an opening. Fortunately, the 11th Circuit won’t allow those employees an automatic win ...

Students often complain about foreign professors whose accents they have trouble understanding. Those concerns can be a legitimate reason for a university to hire a candidate with better communications skills. That’s true even though accent discrimination can be construed as national-origin discrimination.

Thanks to a recent 11th Circuit Court of Appeals decision, it’s now clear that Florida employers can terminate employees who have FMLA leave coming—if they can prove they would have terminated the employee anyway. To prove that, you must be able to produce solid documentation showing that you were indeed going to terminate the employee whether or not she asked for FMLA leave.

Some firefighters have additional law enforcement duties. Those employees are sometimes called “dual assignment” employees under the FLSA and must be paid overtime based on which duties they perform most of the time. That means that once firefighters begin spending the majority of their time on law enforcement duties, they’re eligible for overtime pay after working 86 hours in a two-week period. Firefighters must work more than 106 hours to receive overtime pay.

Bank of America took control of a lot of toxic assets when it purchased brokerage house Merrill Lynch in 2008. Part of the poison was apparently a litigious workforce that couldn’t wait to meet its new co-workers. Two Florida women are part of a sex discrimination lawsuit claiming that the combined companies treat their female financial advisors like “second-class citizens.”

The FMLA provides protected leave for employees who meet the law’s eligibility requirements. That protection includes the right to reinstatement to the same or an equivalent position when the employee is ready to return to work. But that right has limits. Employers are entirely within their rights to continue any disciplinary action they began before the employee went out on leave.

It often makes sense to offer a fresh start to an employee who claims discrimination. By settling her case and moving her to another position, she gets a chance to begin again, and the employer gets a chance to avoid a potentially expensive lawsuit. To make the move effective, make sure that any new supervisors don’t know about the bias complaint.

Employees who have diabetes and take insulin may claim to be disabled. And employers frequently make accommodations to help diabetic employees control their conditions. That doesn’t mean, however, that every diabetic will be able to show he’s disabled under the ADA.