WI Employee Rights Lawyer: Severance, Wages, Job Termination, Discrimination

For the last 100 years, every productivity study in every industry has come to the same conclusion: After about 40 hours in a week, the quality of your work starts to degrade,” she writes. “You make mistakes. That’s why working 60 hours may not save you time or money: You’ll spend too much of that time fixing the mistakes you shouldn’t have made in the meantime. That’s why software companies that limit work to 35 hours a week need to employ fewer QA engineers: There isn’t as much mess to clean up.

9. The material world will not bring you true happiness. My generation was taught to think that happiness and success come from consumption. Materialism doesn’t bring you happiness. The media keeps feeding our need to buy more (appealing to our inner lizard of lack) and then we end up in our 50s or 60s with too much stuff and chained to The Man. We ask ourselves, “Is this all there is?” I am not saying that having abundance is a bad thing. What I am saying is that it is not the answer to happiness.

Dr. Ali Khan, Deputy Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Congress this week that the evidence implicating the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture in the creation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is “unequivocal and compelling.”

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The widespread use of antibiotics in animal agriculture does slightly increase the yield and profit margin obtained by factory farms. But do the American people really think that preserving the profitability of factory farming is more important than the future viability of what may be the most significant medical tool ever developed?

To participate in the campaign to pass H.R. 1549, click here.

Worker abuse is a widespread problem — in a 2007 Zogby poll, 37% of American adults said they had been bullied at work — and most of it is perfectly legal. Workers who are abused based on their membership in a protected class — race, nationality or religion, among others — can sue under civil rights laws. But the law generally does not protect against plain old viciousness.

That may be about to change. Workers’ rights advocates have been campaigning for years to get states to enact laws against workplace bullying, and in May they scored their biggest victory. The New York state senate passed a bill that would let workers sue for physical, psychological or economic harm due to abusive treatment on the job. If New York’s Healthy Workplace Bill becomes law, workers who can show that they were subjected to hostile conduct — including verbal abuse, threats or work sabotage — could be awarded lost wages, medical expenses, compensation for emotional distress and punitive damages.

[U]nlike typical restrictive covenants, upon which a prospective employee’s position may depend, there were no consequences attached to Rinn’s refusal to accept the agreement. The circuit court found Rinn was not pressured to sign the stock option agreement, nor was his employment conditioned upon his doing so. Indeed, the circuit court found Rinn’s refusal would not have affected his employment in any way.

Because the non-compete statute did not apply, the agreement’s non-solicitation and confidentiality provisions were scrutinized under law that was better for the employer. The agreement was found enforceable. The employee’s competitive actions were found in violation of the (enforced) agreement’s provisions. This case is also notable because the Courts involved found sanctions (penalties) should be made against the employee for continuing competitive activities that a court prohibited, and also for violating legal procedural rules (specifically, discovery rules). Bottom lines for WI workers: (1) do not assume that WI’s pro-worker non-compete statute will apply to and/or invalidate your non-compete agreement; (2) with non-competes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure– have an attorney review your situation BEFORE you take a new job and/or engage in activities the employer may allege are non-competitive; (3) there are additional risks to you if you violate a court order (or put yourself in a position where your opponent could argue that to be the case).

Judge Richard Posner of the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals does a lot of reading—but he apparently hates boilerplate as much as the next person.

Appearing at a recent American Constitution Society conference, Posner recalled his encounter with hundreds of pages of documentation for his home equity loan, Above the Law reports. Posner got a laugh when he said he didn’t read it; he just signed it.

The most interesting issue in this article is not it’s focal one, i.e. that a judge ignored the fine print when getting a loan as a consumer.

Most interesting, to me, is that this is a striking example of REAL consumer behavior (e.g. people generally don’t read the fine print of important documents before signing them), as compared to legal fictions (e.g. people are presumed to have read, understood and willingly signed the contract at issue). To me, the scariest aspect of this scenario is not that a judge didn’t read the fine print. Far scarier is that our legal and political systems are based on the legal fictions, rather than the realities.

The first reality: most people don’t understand most of the complex documents they sign. Another reality: many companies take advantage of people who don’t read or understand their contracts. And more companies will do this, the way the trend is headed. That is, if existing economic and legal incentives remain intact, and continue to reward companies who lay traps via fine print.

Scariest of all, note the central element that allows all such contractual transactions to unfold: trust. When people sign contracts they don’t read and/or understand, they do so with the belief that the company that drafted the lengthy fine print can be trusted. That is, our internal monologue that says, “I don’t know what all that stuff in this contract means, but I assume the other party does not intend to take advantage of me.” Judge Posner’s scenario exemplifies the huge role that trust plays in the consumer’s mind– even a very sophisticated consumer who is exceptionally well-versed in law and economics. If all THAT consumer has to rely on is trust– given the lack of law and/or enforcement with teeth for most such scenarios nowadays– yikes.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s inspiring speech for ACS, calling for Americans to take positive action for ourselves and our communities. An excerpt:

“[M]y parents made it clear to my brother and me every single day – you did not get here on your own. ‘All the privilege that you have, young man, was paid for by someone else, you drink deeply from wells of freedom and liberty that you did not dig. You eat lavishly from banquet tables that were prepared for you by your ancestors. You have an obligation; you have a burden – a righteous, glorious burden, because this nation is not finished. We have so much work to do.'”

This is a very interesting talk about the nature of happiness by Daniel Kahneman, behavioral economist and Nobel Prize winner.

Some key points:

– People have two selves: (1) an Experiencing Self, i.e. YOU, as you are reading this, feeling the feelings you feel in real time; and (2) a Remembering Self, i.e. the self we are when we look backward or forward, and think about how satisfied we are about something we did or plan to do.

– Spending time with people we like is the biggest factor that causes happiness in our experiencing self.

– Money earned above $60,000 annually does not increase happiness, according to scientific studies.

– However, poverty definitely causes unhappiness, with a person becoming progressively unhappier the further he or she falls below the $60,000 annual income mark.

An example that comes to my mind that sums this up: BP’s CEO’s Remembering Self probably feels very satisfied (understandably so) with his life accomplishments and earnings. But his Experiencing Self, not feeling much support from other people right now, is probably not happy, notwithstanding his income being substantially higher than $60k.