Many potential clients, friends and some folks I barely know share their knowledge with me about employment law. Unfortunately, many of them are flat wrong. Here are a few of the more common employment law myths I encounter.
“At will” employment means an employee can be fired for anything.” Texas is an at-will
Increasingly popular during the pandemic are apps known as “bossware” and “tattle ware.” These software programs allow supervisors to track the work performed by work-from-home employees. These apps can monitor websites visited, log key strokes, take screenshots and even record video and audio. But, do such apps violate an employee’s privacy? Some states, such as
There are a lot of myths out there about employment law. From time to time, I talk about a few of those myths.
At will
“At will” employment means an employee can be fired for anything.” Texas is an at-will state. An employee can indeed be fired for a lot of things, but not for
Courts have only just started wrestling with the limits of online freedom in the workplace. A decision from the New Jersey Supreme Court provides some guidance. In the case of Stengart v. Loving Care Agency, the former employee left her job. She also left behind her employer issued laptop. On that laptop, she had sent
Some time back, I discussed a case where the defendant in a personal injury lawsyit was trying to obtain continued discovery of a plaintiff’s Facebook and My Space entries. See my prior post. The Houston trial judge had ruled that after the plaintiff changed her settings to private, the defendant could no longer obtain
You would think an average prosecutor has better cases to prosecute. A Michigan man is facing charges of felony computer misuse. The man, Leon Walker, used his wife’s email password to review her gmal account. In reading her emails, he learned that she was having an affair with another man. See MSNBC report. The
I talked about the school issued missing computers last May. See blog post. The Philadelphia school district then activated the webcams on the laptops in the hopes of finding them. But, as it turns out, most were not stolen, at all. So, the district inadvertently downloaded thousands of pictures of various families in their
In a recent decision, the US Supreme Court affirmed the right of employers to review the text messages on employees’ cell phones. In City of Ontario v. Quon, the government employer 
searched the employees’ cell phone for text messages. The cell phone had been issued by the employer. The City believed the employee had exceeded
Personal emails at work are sometimes protected from intrusion and sometimes not. The email system belongs to the employer. One indicator that work generated emails may be protected occurs when the employer allows some personal use of email. See the case discussed at one blog post. But, see another case discussed at a different