Our Blog: Employment Law

Notes for Employees Who Have Been Notified that They’re Being Fired

In my last post I talked about getting the time off work you need for treatment and to care for yourself when faced with a serious illness. Now let’s look at maintaining your income while seeking treatment and/or recovering.

First, this article addresses conditions that are unrelated to work. If your injury or illness resulted at work …

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Negative Performance Reviews: Legitimate Teaching Tools or Cover-Ups for Unlawful Actions or Intentions?

Negative performance reviews can either be legitimate teaching tools or they can be mere documents to support what a manager already plans to do.  In the plaintiff’s employment law world, we call the latter, “papering the file.”  And, oftentimes, managers unfairly paper an employee’s file when planning to …

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Our Associate, Kendra Kutko, was quoted in a great article by TheStreet.com entitled, “Unlimited Vacation Policies Are On The Rise: These Companies Aren’t Counting Your Days Off,”

She shares her expertise on vacation policies in the workplace and the new trend of unlimited vacation policies for employees.

For more from Kendra on unlimited vacation policies for employees, please visit her recent blog post:

Are …

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Notes for employees on what to do if you think you might be fired.
Sometimes, as a lawyer, it’s easy to get caught up in statutory language, burdens of proof, and legal frameworks. Today I want to take a step back from that and offer some thoughts on how to handle one of the most basic employment-related fears: What do I …

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How to care for yourself without derailing your career

In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month the following is the first part of a three-part series regarding coping with a serious health condition, like cancer, in the workplace.

This first part deals with the immediate:  getting time off work for treatment without losing your job.

Oftentimes illnesses …

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LinkedIn, the business-oriented social networking giant, recently announced that as of November 1, 2015, it will offer its employees unlimited vacation time.  LinkedIn will join the ranks of other major employers including General Electric Co., Netflix, Virgin Group, and Groupon in adopting unlimited vacation policies, known in the human resources sphere as “discretionary time off” policies.

There is no federal or …

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Are part time workers’ hours being cut because of ObamaCare?

It has now been five years since the enactment of the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”), more commonly known as ObamaCare.  The White House celebrated this legislative anniversary by emphasizing how this massive health care reform has propelled major increases in insurance coverage for millions of Americans.  On its Twitter feed, the …

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The Vanishing Earned Bonus: Part II

Just wanted to post a quick update to our ongoing blog series addressing the ways in which employers and courts have been eating away at earned bonuses by reliance on language providing employers with absolute discretion in awarding incentive compensation.

Yesterday, in McCleary v. Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, 2015 Ill. App. (1st) 141287-U (Ill. App. 1st Dist. …

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A Worker’s Guide to the Chicago Mayoral Run-Off

In anticipation of the upcoming mayoral runoff election, we thought we’d delve into where the candidates (Rahm Emanuel and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia) stand on issues facing Chicago workers.  Unfortunately, because they have such different political experience – with incumbent Emanuel coming largely from work in the federal government and challenger Garcia being more …

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