How would supervisors in your organization handle this situation: A female employee walks into her boss’s office and complains that one of her co-workers showed her pictures of himself engaged in ... activity best reserved for the privacy of one’s own home (get the gist?). Pretty serious stuff. Apparently one guy didn’t think so ...

Terminations are a legal minefield, but you’d think it would be easy to fire a 911 emergency dispatcher who was found sleeping on the job. Not in today’s lawsuit-happy environment...

You’d think that going into a retail store to pay retail prices with real green money would be a sight for a salesperson’s sore eyes. Not the case at Dillard’s Department Store in Kansas City, which is now facing a messy lawsuit because of one saleswoman’s rudeness.

Ouch for Employers! The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Chair Naomi Earp has just said that EEOC attorneys now work as if they are part of a national law firm. Instead of simply handling a complaint in the geographic region it was filed in, this new model allows EEOC attorneys to strategically scrutinize the employment practices of big companies with multiple sites nationwide and to effectively select the best venue to litigate in.

Does your “Now Hiring” sign really mean “Now Hiring Men”? That appeared to be the case at an Ohio auto dealership, which just settled a sex-discrimination lawsuit with the EEOC. The dealership must pay out $2.3 million to a group of 39 female applicants who were denied sales jobs.

FedEx will write a check for $55 million dollars to settle a class-action suit alleging race and national-origin discrimination in hiring, promotions and performance practices. FedEx’s “pay day” comes after minority employees challenged the company’s “Basic Skills Test” hiring and promotion tool for having a discriminatory impact on them ...

Since when is a manager’s mere “concern” over a disabled employee’s ability to do the job enough justification to terminate? Try never. In the dictionary, “concern” is synonymous with “worry” and “fear.” So, a manager who is wringing his hands with potential concerns about an ADA-protected employee’s performance may soon have bigger things to be concerned with ... like a federal lawsuit.

A court mandated the former CEO of a Nevada company and others to restore over $4.775 million, including interest, to two pension plans.

How should a company welcome back a member of the military and say “thank you”...? Within a few hours of returning from military training to his job at Target Corp., an employee was demoted. Then, after he complained that the demotion violated the Uniform Service Employment and Reemployment Act (USERRA), Target fired him. He was willing to take a bullet for our country, so how did he end up becoming a target in the workplace?...

Do you have to tell your customers you are sexual harassers? Yup, you might have to. Shocking, right? In a startling court order, a judge required a company to inform their customers about their sexual harassment verdict against them for over $1 million ...

“Tr*mp.” “F*ck.” “Sl*t.” “B*tch.” “B*be.” That was the everyday vocabulary for one of the bosses at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama. Sounds like a real loser, right? Not in this case. The official loser was the employee who failed to report the manager’s conduct promtly and, therefore, lost her case in court ...

Question: Open mouth. Insert foot. Taste a lawsuit? The district manager at the Foot Locker did. In a surprising court ruling, a judge decided that only “one comment” made by the district manager about the store manager’s age was enough to hand him his walking papers -- into court that is.

Question: How would you like to work for this guy? ’Joe’ allegedly simulated acts of masturbation and went around sticking his finger in employees’ ears. He also engaged in unwanted touching, sexual jokes and offensive remarks about employees’ bodies. He went so far as to share intimate details about sex with his wife. One employee claims he kissed her on the lips and offered her a promotion in exchange for sex. Those employee, of course, sued for sexual harassment. Seems like a slam dunk, right? Not so ...

Why does testing bring about that sledgehammer-in-the-stomach feeling? Maybe because, as students, we never knew quite what to expect. Now, the same is true when it comes to a recent trend in employment-law cases: applicants and employees making phone calls to secretly test whether your organization is discriminating. While the U.S. Supreme Court has long acknowledged the importance and legality of such testers in civil-rights claims, two new court cases offer critical lessons for employers ...