It’s been a very long week. After five grueling twelve-hour days, you are ready for some rest. You are also ready for that overtime payment. However, when payday comes, you notice that you were paid at your regular rate for overtime hours. You think that this has to be a mistake, so you ask your employer. If your employer tells you that it was not a mistake, and that you were paid regular time because you are exempt from being paid overtime—this may raise more questions than it answers. You might wonder if your boss is correct. Is this possible? Is it legal? It is true that some employees are ..read more

American workers are the backbone of this country. Employees spend hours working over a burning hot grill, waiting tables, working on assembly lines, delivering packages in time for the holidays, and a multitude of other tasks required to keep our economy going. And despite all this, they are frequently taken advantage of by greedy companies. It is because our workers are so important that we at Ottinger Employment Lawyers fight for them every day. When an employer tries to violate the rights of a worker, they are plucking at the strings that bind us all together. Today, we will be discussing ..read more

You’re an associate at a wealth management firm in Sacramento, where, for the past couple of months, your manager has been making increasingly inappropriate comments about your appearance and body. You tried to tell your manager that these comments make you uncomfortable, but he laughed off your concerns. You go to speak to HR, saying that you’re considering filing a formal complaint of sexual harassment against your manager. But the next day, your manager calls you into his office, where you learn you’re being fired. Despite your history of positive performance, you weren’t a good fit for the ..read more

Around 40 percent of American workers face limitations in their career development and earning power due to an employer’s non-compete agreement. Often under the guise of safeguarding a company’s protected information, these contracts restrict when and where employees can find work in their chosen industry, trapping workers in undesirable jobs and preventing them from making a competitive living wage.  Fortunately for workers in California, though, companies are forbidden from using non-compete agreements in the Golden State. California’s labor law is one of the strictest in the nation whe ..read more

Ottinger Employment Lawyers Can Help with Non-Compete Agreements New York non-compete agreements are widely abused and overused.   Most of them are not enforceable because New York disfavors them. New York courts will only enforce them in only very rare limited situations.   As explained more below, we are able to defeat most non-compete agreements by using the Legitimate Business Interests Test. A court will only enforce a non-compete agreement if the company can satisfy this test and most companies cannot do so.    Non-compete agreements were historically used by com ..read more

On November 4, 2022, thousands of employees at Twitter were dismayed to log into their company email only to learn that their jobs had suddenly been eliminated. Just days after purchasing the popular social media company, billionaire and new CEO Elon Musk caused an uproar by initiating major layoffs that eliminated over half of Twitter’s workforce with little warning.  In the wake of the announcement, some employees moved quickly from shock to anger, claiming that the layoffs weren’t just ill-timed and unfair but also illegally discriminatory against older workers. In the past couple mont ..read more

Certain California workers can look forward to a pay bump in the coming year, thanks to new legislation recently approved by the governor. Out of hundreds of bills debated by lawmakers in the fall 2023 session, two initiatives to increase minimum wage pay for Californians in the healthcare and fast food industries were among those finally signed into law by Governor Newsom in October. In this blog post, we’ll dig into what these new laws, Senate Bill 525 and Assembly Bill 1228, mean for workers. First, we’ll review the current state of California’s minimum wage laws, then walk through the deta ..read more

Between new COVID-19 variants, nationwide strikes in major industries, rolling layoffs, and the acceleration of generative AI-induced wonder (or panic) — the past year has brought a number of changes and challenges to workers across the U.S.  While these events garnered headlines, though, New York workplaces saw some important changes closer to home in 2023. Over the past calendar year, a handful of new labor laws and updated policies have officially gone into effect across the state, bringing with them new regulations and benefits for employees and companies alike. This blog post will sh ..read more

It looked like a classic case of employer retaliation.  A. was a bartender at Kolla’s nightclub in Orange County. In April 2014, after she hadn’t been paid for three shifts in a row, she approached the club’s owner to ask about her unpaid wages. In response, her boss flew into a rage. He fired A. on the spot, telling her to never return to the club, and threatened to call immigration services on her. Several months later, the California Labor Commissioner sued Kolla’s for violating the state Labor Code by stealing wages and retaliating against a whistleblower. Although the court was on bo ..read more

McKenzie was at home, washing baby bottles for her newborn, when she got the news that her position as a communications professional at Salesforce had been eliminated. She was shocked — although the company had announced in early 2023 that 10% of the workforce would be laid off, McKenzie thought that she’d be legally protected from termination by her maternity leave.  She’s not entirely wrong: pregnant workers are entitled to specific protections and benefits under federal and state law that shield them from discriminatory demotion or firing due to their condition. But did ..read more