By Jason Bohanan

Communicating with employees is essential to the health of any business. Daily communication between management, supervisors, and front-line employees helps keep every aspect of the business running, from planning meetings to ensuring everyday assignments are completed. Unfortunately, no method of communication is perfect. Communication breakdowns, such as lost memos and unchecked voicemails, can hamper almost every department within a company.

For employers, communicating detailed safety procedures with large numbers of workers can be difficult. Finding the most effective method of reaching employees and ensuring the lines of communication remain open takes work and innovation. Many firms, however, are encountering two relatively new obstacles to reaching workers: language barriers and hearing impairments. Companies are hiring more employees who either cannot speak English fluently or have hearing impairments than in the past. Unfortunately, many of these businesses have not planned how to provide adequate safety training to workers who have trouble communicating.

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By Lorraine Yeomans

Recent actions by President Barack Obama’s administration and a flurry of new local laws are reviving discussion on the issue of gender identity (sometimes also referred to as gender expression) discrimination. Since 1993, when Minnesota adopted the first state law protecting against discrimination based on gender identity, employers have been doing their best to modify workplace practices to ensure compliance with gender identity and often-related sexual orientation protections. This has not always been an easy task, and employers are often confused by the distinctions these laws create.

As you’re probably already aware, neither sexual orientation nor gender identity are protected classes under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As a result, many state and local governments have specifically included provisions for sexual orientation and/or gender identity in their non-discrimination laws. Because these state and local laws often encompass one or the other (sexual orientation or gender identity), but not always both, it is important for employers to understand the distinction between the two terms.

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A Wall Street Journal analysis of recent data sets reveals unexpected characteristics of current employment losses. The last 10 years have seen an increasing parity in employment among men and women, but because the majority of women came into the job market later, it was expected that layoffs — following a last-in/first-out pattern — would hit women harder. Quite unexpectedly, however, more than 70 percent of the jobs lost since December 2007 were held by men.

One factor seems to be that the downturn hit manufacturing and construction hardest and men disproportionately are employed in these sectors. (In 2007, men represented 93 percent of construction and 72 percent of manufacturing employment.) The near collapse of U.S. auto manufacturing reduced the ranks of employees of the Detroit Three and their domestic supply chain. And construction had become overstaffed during the building boom because of easy mortgages. Many construction and auto supply companies were exhausted and undercapitalized, and they simply went out of business, lacking the will or resources to attempt to preserve their core workforces through reduced hours and alternative employment.

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The New Jersey Division on Civil Rights (DCR) recently issued a probable-cause finding against an employer and its owner. The owner admittedly used the “n” word in the presence of an Asian employee who has a biracial child and a black fiance.

Facts

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