A federal wage investigation into a Georgia urgent care operator found a pay problem that’s easy to overlook and expensive to ignore: workers were paid their regular rate, not time-and-a-half, for overtime hours spent in mandatory orientation, staff meetings and training. The U.S. Department of Labor says the total owed came to $113,199. And when…

Thirty-one people who cooked, cleaned and served food at a Pompano Beach buffet restaurant found out their steady “salary” was actually a way to avoid paying them what federal law requires. The U.S. Department of Labor says the restaurant’s owner now has to hand back $732,976 in back wages, an average of $23,644 per worker,…

A federal employee who has spent thirty years earning step increases and finishing one four-year assignment after another no longer gets that cushion if an agency has to cut staff. Starting this past Wednesday, September 2, the Office of Personnel Management requires agencies to rank employees for a reduction in force mainly by a numeric…

The federal government’s in-house discrimination watchdog wants to tear up the rulebook it has used for years to process complaints from its own workforce. On August 26, 2026, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted to issue a proposed rule rewriting how federal employees and job applicants report workplace discrimination, and the change would eventually…

Pearson Education has agreed to pay $150,000 to close out a federal disability-discrimination case built around a simple complaint: employees who are blind or have low vision said they could not get into the same online systems everyone else used to check benefits, leave balances and required training. The settlement, announced by the U.S. Equal…

An Indianapolis provider of residential services for people with developmental disabilities will pay $65,000 to resolve a federal lawsuit accusing it of rejecting a job applicant because he is deaf. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Damar Services, Inc. after a single phone interview in 2023 in which, the agency says, staff learned the…

A company that manages six senior living communities in Arizona has agreed to pay $250,000 to settle a federal lawsuit accusing it of leaving female employees to deal with repeated sexual harassment from residents on its own. The case, brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Christian Care Management, Inc. (CCMI), centers on…

Independent contractor status sounds like a technical HR label, but it decides three very concrete things: whether a worker is guaranteed the federal minimum wage, whether they are owed overtime, and whether they can take job-protected leave. A new Department of Labor proposal would redraw the line between contractor and employee, making it easier for…

A federal agency says a North Carolina store manager gave a pregnant employee hours to produce a doctor’s note on New Year’s Eve, then fired her when she couldn’t get one in time. The case, filed as a lawsuit rather than settled quietly, is a reminder of a federal law many hourly workers and their…

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced this week that Ford Motor Company has agreed to pay $2.3 million to resolve a years-long harassment investigation tied to its stamping plant near Buffalo, New York. Investigators found reasonable cause to believe workers there were exposed to racist and ethnically targeted graffiti in bathrooms and break rooms,…