Category: Employment Law

Your employer can read your work email, and in most of the country it doesn’t need to tell you first. The account belongs to the company. The server belongs to the company. The federal law that protects electronic communications, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, contains an exception for the provider of the system, and when…

Whether you’re an employee or independent contractor doesn’t depend on what the contract calls you, what the company calls you, or whether you get a W-2 or a 1099. It depends on how the work actually happens. Courts and agencies look at who controls the work, who bears the financial risk, and whether the job…

To file an EEOC complaint, which the agency calls a charge of discrimination, you have 180 days from the discriminatory act. That stretches to 300 days if a state or local agency also enforces a similar law, and most states have one. That deadline is the single most important fact about the process. It is…

Whether non-competes are enforceable depends almost entirely on which state you’re in, because the federal attempt to ban them is dead. The Federal Trade Commission issued a nationwide ban in April 2024. A federal court in Texas blocked it before it took effect, the FTC withdrew its appeal in September 2025, and the rule was…

Whether salaried employees get overtime has nothing to do with the word “salaried” and everything to do with two tests under the Fair Labor Standards Act: how much you’re paid and what you actually do. Employers get this wrong constantly, sometimes on purpose. Putting a worker on salary does not make them exempt. A salaried…

Before you sign a severance agreement, understand what it actually is. It’s a contract in which your employer pays you money in exchange for giving up the right to sue. That is the whole transaction. The payment is not a bonus, a thank-you, or a legal requirement. No federal law obligates a private employer to…

When an employer won’t give you your last paycheck, the leverage you have depends on your state, because federal law sets no deadline for final wages at all. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires that you be paid at least minimum wage and overtime for the hours you worked. It says nothing about when. State…

Getting fired after complaining to HR is not automatically retaliation, but the timing alone makes a claim worth taking seriously. Federal law bans retaliation only when the complaint was about something the law protects. That means discrimination, harassment, wage violations, safety, or a handful of other categories. A complaint that your manager is rude, or…