Dallas Employment Law Blog

Job seekers in Dallas, Texas, and throughout the country may face difficulty finding employment if they have criminal convictions in their past. Luckily, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently updated its guidelines on the practice of criminal background checks by employers. The EEOC was concerned that these checks lead to employment discrimination against minority individuals who have higher rates of criminal convictions than whites.

The EEOC's new policy suggests that employers give job applicants the opportunity to explain past criminal arrests or convictions that come up in background checks. The EEOC also urges employers not to inquire about an applicant's previous convictions on job applications, especially when a person's criminal history has nothing to do with the job he or she hopes to get.

A former federal employee of the Library of Congress is pursuing a workplace discrimination complaint against his former employer, based on religious and sexual orientation harassment.

The employee, a 30-year-old male, traces the root of the harassment back to his "Like" on a Facebook page that promoted homosexual adoption. The employee was also Facebook friends with his supervisor's daughter, who commented negatively about his "Like" of that particular website. The employee alleged that his supervisor's daughter almost immediately "unfriended" him on Facebook, and he was treated differently at work from that day forward.

Contract disputes can be complicated. The city of Fort Worth, Texas, made a policy change to overtime rules that directly affect firefighters and now, the Fort Worth Professional Firefighters Association is suing the city saying that the city made this change without notifying the firefighters association.

The city made the policy change in January 2009 which took away paid time-and-a-half for a firefighter. Before the change, a firefighter could take time off of for sick or vacation leave during the week and still get paid for it. It was a benefit that was more generous than the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards. The association's dispute is that this policy change took place in January 2009, but their new collective bargaining agreement wasn't reached until 2010. The firefighters believe that the city should have bargained in good faith.

The city of Kalamazoo, Michigan, recently settled a federal discrimination lawsuit filed by an employee of the city's public safety department. The employee claimed that because of his obsessive-compulsive disorder he was treated differently than other employees and was wrongfully terminated because of his disorder.

The city agreed to grant him a duty disability retirement for which he will collect a pension in the amount of a little over $4,000 per month. The city's attorney also said it would pay him for vacation and sick time he accrued and settled a worker's compensation claim he had previously filed with the city. The city will also pay his attorney fees and remove any records of disciplinary actions documented in his personnel file related to the discrimination complaint.