Our Blog: Employment Contracts and Agreements

Happy New Year!  All of us at at the Firm took a couple of weeks off to enjoy our families and the holiday season.   We hope you did as well.

This first week of the year was looking a little light in workplace news until the end of the week when two interesting pieces of news dropped.

First, on Thursday the …

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In 2016, the Illinois legislature passed the Illinois Freedom to Work Act which banned non-competes, one type of restrictive covenants, for employees earning minimum wage or less.  If you recall, this Act was a direct response to the Jimmy John’s non-compete debacle.  In that instance, the Illinois Attorney General sued Jimmy Johns and the sandwich-maker relented.

While that Act was a good …

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The recent arbitration decision could backfire on employers.

The Supreme Court really stuck it to employees in their recent Epic Systems decision.  We’ve written about arbitration provisions in general here and why they can be bad for employees.   As if giving up your right to a jury trial wasn’t bad enough, arbitration agreements also sometimes contain class action waivers.  Employers …

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Employers take advantage of vulnerable employees by forcing them to sign unnecessary non-compete agreements

Time Magazine recently ran an article that discussed how non-compete agreements particularly hurt lower-wage earners.

Remember the 2014 controversy surrounding Jimmy John’s forcing their sandwich makers to sign non-compete agreements?  That ignited a discussion about the unequal balance of power between employees and employers and particularly …

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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 number of years ago, we published a blog setting out several tools employers have used to deny employees what we believe are earned bonuses as well as some ideas about legal principles on which an employee might rely to get those bonuses back.  For that complete blog post, scroll to the bottom of this page.  Now more than five years later, …

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The Vanishing Earned Bonus [Part I] – And How to Get it Back!

Every year, around this time we start to get calls from employees who have not only lost their jobs but have also been denied their year-end bonus, which so many families depend on in budgeting their lives.  Employers use all kinds of tricks to withhold what employees rightly feel …

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