Texas Employment Law Blog : San Antonio Employment Discrimination Lawyer & Attorney : McKinney Law Firm : Sexual Harassment, Wrongful Termination : Texas

County Attorney Andrew Thomas issued a press release this week announcing that his office has filed the state’s first employer sanctions case, a civil complaint against an employer accused of violating the Legal Arizona Worker’s Act. The civil action alleges that a Scottsdale company allegedly hired illegal labor deliberately by using a “subcontractor” which was in reality an employee who was not authorized to work in the United States.

According to the release, in January 2009, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office made a number of identity theft arrests after learning illegal immigrants were employed at the business. The civil complaint alleges that an illegal worker who voluntarily returned to Mexico returned to Arizona and created a company to provide services and labor solely for the the charged company. The complaint alleges that the company, which was formed in April 2009, was established to circumvent the Legal Arizona Worker’s Act. 

You can read the entire press release here

Many states are either implementing or contemplating similar laws so this case will be an interesting one to keep an eye on.

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 Yet another example of an employee believing that his statements published for the world to see online are somehow anonymous or not subject to his employer's scrutiny.  

The Huffington Post this week has the story of a school employee lost his job after he posted a one-word vulgarity in the comments section of an online article at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  The school employee posted an anonymous, one-word comment that referred, in vulgar terms, to a woman's anatomy on a newspaper's comment section.  An editor from the paper tracked the IP address for the comment to a school district computer and sent the district the information (perhaps with the thought that a student needed to be warned against using the school computer lab for such activities).  The district's IT department used that information to track down the sender, which turned out to be an employee.

Said employee is, as a result, no longer gainfully employed.  You can read the entire story here.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, don't post something online that you wouldn't want your momma to read.

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The New York Times had a really excellent article last week about how difficult it is in this country for seniors who need a job.  Nearly half a million workers 65 and older want to work but cannot find a job — more than five times the level early this decade and this group’s highest unemployment level since the Great Depression.

The situation is made more dire because of numerous recent trends: many people over 65 have lost their jobs as seniority protections have weakened, and like most other Americans, a higher percentage of them took on debt than in previous generations.

The expectation once was to pay off your 30-year mortgage before you retired, or come close. Instead, the level of indebtedness among older Americans has risen faster than in any other age group, partly because so many obtained second mortgages to take money out of their homes.

You can read the entire article here.

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