Want the legal right to ignore your boss outside working hours? Learn from the French; The Guardian, August 23, 2024

 Alexander Hurst, The Guardian; Want the legal right to ignore your boss outside working hours? Learn from the French

"Every August, the same set of transatlantic memes about work and holiday circulate on social media. The European is depicted as out of the office with a strict attitude towards switching off and not responding to clients (“I’m away camping for the summer – please contact me as of 2 September”) while for the American there is no such luxury (“I’m in the hospital – I’m so so sorry for the 30-minute delay in getting back to you!”)...

Since 2017, French labour law has included the “right to disconnect” – a measure the UK government is now also considering. The law, which applies to companies with more than 50 workers, obliges businesses to clearly define normal working hours and set out policies around work communications negotiated with employees, andallows workers to be unreachable, or to not reply, when work is over. Other European countries, including Belgium, Spain and Italy, have since followed suit.

Sarah Wachter, communications manager at a Paris-based fintech company, says that at her workplace “there is so much encouragement not to respond after hours”, which she attributes to “a combination of knowing it’s the law and knowing that people support it. I feel 100% in my rights to disconnect every weekend, in the evenings, when I’m sick, on vacation. I feel no pressure to answer my emails or other work communications.”

In contrast, Sabina, a 29-year-old American currently working remotely from Paris, told me that she was seeking a transfer to her company’s European office – in part because she was fed up with the expectation that she would always be available."

Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours; Reuters, August 26, 2024

Lewis Jackson, Reuters; Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

"Is your boss texting you on the weekend? Work email pinging long after you've left for home?

Australian employees can now ignore those and other intrusions into home life thanks to a new "right to disconnect" law designed to curb the creep of work emails and calls into personal lives.

The new rule, which came into force on Monday, means employees, in most cases, cannot be punished for refusing to read or respond to contacts from their employers outside work hours."

Federal officials caution employers on using AI in hiring; FCW, May 12, 2022

 Natalie Alms, FCW; Federal officials caution employers on using AI in hiring

"The growing use of artificial intelligence and other software tools for hiring, performance monitoring and pay determination in the workplace is compounding discriminiation against people with disabilities, federal civil rights officials say.

Artificial intelligence can be deployed to target job ads to certain potential applicants, hold online job interviews, assess the skills of job applicants and even decide if an applicant meets job requirements. But the technology can discriminate against applicants and employees with disabilities.

On Thursday, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Justice put employers on alert that they're responsible for not using AI tools in ways that discriminate and inform employees of their rights, agency officials told reporters."

Office snacks might be dying off. Good.; Vox, May 5, 2022

Emily Stewart , Vox ; Office snacks might be dying off. Good. 

If your employer loves you, they should give you money, not a granola bar.

"I’m not saying office snacks are the devil. (And maybe I’m just the office snack grinch!) Of the ways companies try to get employees to work longer and harder and feel better about their jobs without having to do much, snacks are just a small factor. Some firms pay for dinner, but only if you stay until a certain time. Or they’ll put gyms and massages and dry cleaning services on the premises, which again, sure, fine, but maybe everyone would be fine just working out without their coworkers around, and leaving the premises to do so. And all of these perks shouldn’t overshadow what really makes a workplace good: good pay, reliable benefits, a safe environment. A couple of years ago, I talked to a Family Dollar worker who said corporate had sent her store cookies at the outset of the pandemic while the workers waited for sneeze guards. I think about it a lot.

If work-from-home and a dying tax deduction are the death of office snacks, it won’t be the end of the world. They were never that great in the first place."

Getting Organized; American Libraries, March 1, 2022

 Cass Balzer, American Libraries; Getting Organized

More library staffers are turning to unions for security and social equity

"As at SPL and Northwestern, Kahn says the decision by University of Michigan library staff members to unionize has a lot to do with equity, accountability, and transparency. “The thing that people learn right away is that this is not an information problem,” Kahn says. “It’s not that the employer doesn’t know that we’re underpaid or doesn’t know that we’re upset about some of our working conditions. It’s a lack of political will to change those things.”"

Congress approves bill to end forced arbitration in sexual assault cases; NPR, February 10, 2022

 Deirdre Walsh, NPR ; Congress approves bill to end forced arbitration in sexual assault cases

"The Senate approved legislation banning the practice of using clauses in employment contracts that force victims of sexual assault and harassment to pursue their cases in forced arbitration, which shields accused perpetrators.

Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., introduced the bill five years ago and lawmakers negotiated with business leaders to get support for the bill. In a sign of the overwhelming support for the measure, it was approved by voice vote in the chamber.

The bill, called the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, was passed with a large bipartisan vote by the House of Representatives on Monday and heads to President Biden's desk for his signature.

The bill gives individuals a choice between going to court or going to arbitration to resolve allegations in cases related to sexual harassment or assault. The measure is also retroactive — invalidating any existing forced arbitration clauses in ongoing cases that could make it difficult for any survivors to litigate cases against their employers.""

Where Automated Job Interviews Fall Short; Harvard Business Review (HBR), January 27, 2022

Zahira Jaser, Dimitra Petrakaki, Rachel Starr, and Ernesto Oyarbide-Magaña, Harvard Business Review (HBR) ; Where Automated Job Interviews Fall Short

"The use of artificial intelligence in HR processes is a new, and likely unstoppable, trend. In recruitment, up to 86% of employers use job interviews mediated by technology, a growing portion of which are automated video interviews (AVIs).

AVIs involve job candidates being interviewed by an artificial intelligence, which requires them to record themselves on an interview platform, answering questions under time pressure. The video is then submitted through the AI developer platform, which processes the data of the candidate — this can be visual (e.g. smiles), verbal (e.g. key words used), and/or vocal (e.g. the tone of voice). In some cases, the platform then passes a report with an interpretation of the job candidate’s performance to the employer.

The technologies used for these videos present issues in reliably capturing a candidate’s characteristics. There is also strong evidence that these technologies can contain bias that can exclude some categories of job-seekers. The Berkeley Haas Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership reports that 44% of AI systems are embedded with gender bias, with about 26% displaying both gender and race bias. For example, facial recognition algorithms have a 35% higher detection error for recognizing the gender of women of color, compared to men with lighter skin.

But as developers work to remove biases and increase reliability, we still know very little on how AVIs (or other types of interviews involving artificial intelligence) are experienced by different categories of job candidates themselves, and how these experiences affect them, this is where our research focused. Without this knowledge, employers and managers can’t fully understand the impact these technologies are having on their talent pool or on different group of workers (e.g., age, ethnicity, and social background). As a result, organizations are ill-equipped to discern whether the platforms they turn to are truly helping them hire candidates that align with their goals. We seek to explore whether employers are alienating promising candidates — and potentially entire categories of job seekers by default — because of varying experiences of the technology."

What Do I Do if My Employer Does Something I Can’t Abide?; The New York Times, June 12, 2020

Roxane Gay, The New York Times; What Do I Do if My Employer Does Something I Can’t Abide?

You have to calibrate the difference between dumb and unacceptable, what you can live with and what you cannot.

"You have to pick your battles. You have to calibrate the difference between stupid and unacceptable, what you can live with and what you cannot. Because you work for a newspaper that will always publish a range of content, some of which you agree with and some of which you do not, you also have to calibrate the difference between disagreement and disgust.

That’s the tidy answer that doesn’t really force you to make the difficult decision. But now, more than ever, with so much at stake, we have to be willing to make difficult decisions. We have to be willing to make ourselves uncomfortable in service of what’s right. When the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kept his knee on George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, three of his co-workers stood by and did nothing. When a police officer in Buffalo shoved a 75-year-old man to the ground, dozens of his co-workers walked past that fallen man, bleeding from his ear. They did nothing.

Most situations in which you object to your employer’s conduct won’t be so extreme. But something terrible happened in this country, something that has happened with horrifying frequency. Each time we think maybe this time, something will change. For a few days or even a few weeks, change seems possible — and then we all get comfortable again. We forget about whatever terrible thing once held our attention. A new terrible thing happens. We get outraged. It’s a vicious cycle, but it is one we can break. When your employer does something that violates your ethical code, when it does something that endangers employees or the greater community, you have to ask yourself if you are going to do nothing — or get angry, vent and hold your employer accountable in whatever ways you can. I am, perhaps, simplifying the choices you can make, but maybe doing the right thing is far simpler than we allow ourselves to believe."

‘The Algorithm Made Me Do It’: Artificial Intelligence Ethics Is Still On Shaky Ground; Forbes, December 22, 2019

Joe McKendrick, Forbes; ‘The Algorithm Made Me Do It’: Artificial Intelligence Ethics Is Still On Shaky Ground

"While artificial intelligence is the trend du jour across enterprises of all types, there’s still scant attention being paid to its ethical ramifications. Perhaps it’s time for people to step up and ask the hard questions. For enterprises, it’s time to bring together — or recruit — people who can ask the hard questions.

In one recent survey by Genesys, 54% of employers questioned say they are not troubled that AI could be used unethically by their companies as a whole or by individual employees. “Employees appear more relaxed than their bosses, with only 17% expressing concern about their companies,” the survey’s authors add...

Sandler and his co-authors focus on the importance of their final point, urging that organizations establish an AI ethics committee, comprised of stakeholders from across the enterprise — technical, legal, ethical, and organizational. This is still unexplored territory, they caution: “There are not yet data and AI ethics committees with established records of being effective and well-functioning, so there are no success models to serve as case-studies or best practices for how to design and implement them.”"

The Legal and Ethical Implications of Using AI in Hiring; Harvard Business Review, April 25, 2019

Ben Dattner, 

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, 

Richard Buchband, 

Lucinda Schettler

, Harvard Business Review; 

The Legal and Ethical Implications of Using AI in Hiring

"Using AI, big data, social media, and machine learning, employers will have ever-greater access to candidates’ private lives, private attributes, and private challenges and states of mind. There are no easy answers to many of the new questions about privacy we have raised here, but we believe that they are all worthy of public discussion and debate."

Pennsylvania High Court Decision Regarding Data Breach Increases Litigation Risk for Companies Storing Personal Data; Lexology, January 8, 2019

Ropes & Gray LLP , Lexology; Pennsylvania High Court Decision Regarding Data Breach Increases Litigation Risk for Companies Storing Personal Data

"This decision could precipitate increased data breach class action litigation against companies that retain personal data. No state Supreme Court had previously recognized the existence of a negligence-based duty to safeguard personal information, other than in the narrow context of health care patient information."

Pennsylvania High Court Finds Duty to Safeguard Employee Information; Lexology, November 26, 2018

Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP, Lexology; Pennsylvania High Court Finds Duty to Safeguard Employee Information

"The Pennsylvania Supreme Court handed the state’s employees a major legal victory last week when it decided that employers have an affirmative legal responsibility to protect the confidential information of its employees...

In reversing two lower courts, the justices ruled that, by collecting and storing employee’s personal information as a pre-condition to employment, employers had the legal duty to take reasonable steps to protect that information from a cyber-attack...

The ruling revives a proposed class action lawsuit against the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and one of its hospitals, UPMC McKeesport, after a 2014 data breach in which hackers allegedly stole the personal information of 62,000 former and current employees...

Whether the ruling is viewed narrowly as confined to its facts, or more broadly as establishing a general legal duty to safeguard confidential information, there is little question that the decision marks an important development in tort law governing data breach cases...

The case is Dittman et al. v. UPMC, Case No. 43 WAP 2017."

Public May Not Trust Higher Ed, but Employers Do; Inside Higher Ed, August 28, 2018

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, Inside Higher Ed; Public May Not Trust Higher Ed, but Employers Do

"A couple of the skills that both parties valued the most: effective oral communication and critical thinking.

But while 90 percent of managers, and 80 percent of executives, considered oral communication “very important” in their hiring, only 47 percent of the managers and 40 percent of the executives believe students are well prepared in this regard."

Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply; Wall Street Journal, August 30, 2018

Kate Davidson, Wall Street Journal; Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply

"The job market’s most sought-after skills can be tough to spot on a résumé.

Companies across the U.S. say it is becoming increasingly difficult to find applicants who can communicate clearly, take initiative, problem-solve and get along with co-workers."

The future belongs to those with ‘soft skills’; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 14, 2018

Gregg Behr, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; The future belongs to those with ‘soft skills’

"As the world changes in rapid, unpredictable ways, tomorrow’s most successful learners will “need more than the ability to read, write and do arithmetic,” according to researchers writing in the journal The Future of Children. To thrive, they’ll also need to understand and manage their emotions, set and achieve goals, feel and show concern for others, establish positive relationships and make responsible decisions.

Now, many educators and parents are leading the charge to restore these skills — often called social-emotional or 21st-century skills — to their deserved role in a learner’s development...

A review of 82 social-emotional learning programs, conducted last year by a team of international researchers, found that students with soft-skills training scored 13 points higher academically than their peers — a boost that persisted well into adulthood. So, perhaps it’s no surprise that 90 percent of educators on the front lines think soft skills are both beneficial and teachable, according to The Aspen Institute’s National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development.

These benefits aren’t limited to academics, either. Writing in The Washington Post, author and educator Cathy N. Davidson recalled how Project Oxygen, a 2013 analysis of Google’s human-resources data, “shocked everyone” by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, expertise in STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and math — “comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills.” In fact, 80 percent of employers said they value such skills above all."

United States: The Defend Trade Secrets Act: A Q&A With Neil Mckittrick; Mondaq, August 7, 2017

James McGrew, Mondaq; United States: The Defend Trade Secrets Act: A Q&A With Neil Mckittrick

"JM: What are some policies or best practices that employers can put in place to protect their trade secrets?

NM: An employer's primary goal should be to ensure that trade secrets remain "secret." For example, employees who have access to trade secrets should sign confidentiality agreements. Employers should also consider taking other reasonable steps to maintain the confidential nature of their trade secrets, such as limiting access to trade secrets to those employees who have a legitimate business reason to use that information, reminding departing employees of their confidentiality obligations, storing trade secrets only in password-protected locations and on password-protected devices, and implementing a strong password policy."

The One Question You Should Ask About Every New Job; New York Times, 12/19/15

Adam Grant, New York Times; The One Question You Should Ask About Every New Job:

"When it comes to landing a good job, many people focus on the role. Although finding the right title, position and salary is important, there’s another consideration that matters just as much: culture. The culture of a workplace — an organization’s values, norms and practices — has a huge impact on our happiness and success.

But how do you figure out the culture of a company you’ve never worked for? As Nicole tried to evaluate company cultures, she kept asking the Passover question: “How is this organization different from all other organizations?” And, as with Passover, I told Nicole, the answer should come in the form of a story. Ask people to tell you a story about something that happened at their organization but wouldn’t elsewhere."

Colleges should teach work skills; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 5/16/13

Mark Bauerlein, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Colleges should teach work skills: "Yet, it turns out, professors don't coddle students and overlook youthful flaws. Another survey by York College finds that professors think the same thing as employers do. It's the 2012 "Professionalism on Campus" survey, a questionnaire about juniors and seniors answered by 415 college and university faculty members. Professors generally agree that professionalism includes attentiveness, punctuality and a work ethic, and 37 percent think it has declined over the past five years, while only 12 percent see an improvement. Even more than employers, fully 64 percent of professors observe an increase in a sense of entitlement in recent years, while only 5 percent say it has decreased. The students text-message during class, send emails to teachers with grammar and spelling errors, and act "unfocused." Faculty members identify parents as the main cause, though American culture in general and grade inflation in high school also receive blame."

Employers on uncertain ground over workers' 'protected' use of social media; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 11/8/11

Len Boselovic, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Employers on uncertain ground over workers' 'protected' use of social media:

"The recent suspension of three U.S. Steel employees for posting pictures from the company's Clairton coke plant on Facebook highlights a growing issue for employers: regulating the online conduct of their workers.

Employers are grappling with how to preserve their reputations and proprietary information on Facebook, Twitter and similar sites without violating the rights of their employees. Drawing that line can be difficult."

[Podcast] Can Bosses Do That? As It Turns Out, Yes They Can; NPR, Morning Edition, 1/29/10

[Podcast] NPR, Morning Edition; Can Bosses Do That? As It Turns Out, Yes They Can:

http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=123024596&m=123098924

Article Link and Excerpt from Lewis Maltby's (2010) book, "Can They Do That?: Retaking Our Fundamental Rights in the Workplace":

"Did you know you could be fired for not removing a political sticker from your car — or even having a beer after work? Lewis Maltby says it's more than possible — it's happened. His new book, Can They Do That? explores rights in the workplace.

As he tells NPR's Ari Shapiro, "Freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment — but only where the government is concerned.

"What most Americans generally don't know is that the Constitution doesn't apply to private corporations at all."

In terms of monitoring its employees, the list of things a corporation can't do is a short one — it's basically confined to eavesdropping on a personal oral conversation, Maltby said. "Anything else is open season."

And outside the workplace, personal blogs or social media pages on services like Twitter or Facebook offer no refuge.

Asked if workers can be fired for things they write on those sites, Maltby said, "Absolutely. Happens every day.""

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123024596