Military FMLA Leave: Qualifying Exigency Leave

Employees already eligible for leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) with family in the military are entitled to two new forms of FMLA leave benefits -- qualifying exigency (QE) leave and military caregiver leave (MCL). The rules for employer coverage (employing 50 employees within a 75-mile radius) and employee eligibility (they've worked 12 months and 1,250 hours) are the same as for traditional FMLA leave. Of help to employers, the U.S. Department of Labor's (DOL) November 2008 rules also created a required notice and certification process similar to what applies to traditional FMLA leave.
On the other hand, the military FMLA leave provisions expanded the reasons employees may take leave, which family members are eligible for leave, and for some employees, the length of time they may be absent. For example, to give meaning to the new military provisions, the DOL lifted the age and disability limitations for "son" and "daughter" as they apply to military leave. As with traditional FMLA leave, however, employers may ask an employee for reasonable documentation or, when proof is unavailable, a statement of the family relationship.

U.S. District Court Upholds E-Verify System

U.S. District Court ruled in favor of the U.S. government in a lawsuit challenging the legality of the E-Verify system (Chamber of Commerce of the United States v. Napolitano). This means that beginning September 8, 2009, federal contractors and subcontractors will be required to use the E-Verify system to ensure their employees are legally authorized to work in the United States. The requirement is designed to stop federal contractors and subcontractors from hiring illegal immigrants.
The E-Verify system is a federal government online database program that allows employers to verify employment eligibility by electronically comparing employee information taken from the Employment Eligibility Verification Form (Form I-9) against the records in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Social Security Administration (SSA) databases. The system, which facilitates compliance with federal immigration laws and is currently voluntary for employers, is jointly operated by the DHS and the SSA and is overseen by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
The E-Verify program has continued to face opposition from immigrant advocacy groups and business groups that assert the databases used by the E-Verify system are full of errors. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of the business groups strongly opposed to the E-Verify system, initiated the lawsuit against the government in an effort to prevent the program from becoming mandatory for federal contractors and subcontractors.
The U.S. District Court in Maryland held that requiring federal contractors and subcontractors to use E-Verify doesn’t violate federal immigration law. Specifically, the court noted that the rule doesn’t require any person or entity to use the system since organizations and individuals voluntarily decide whether to become government contractors and subcontractors. The court also noted that the President and the U.S. government had the authority to enact the requirement.
Although the Bush administration attempted to make E-Verify mandatory for federal contractors and subcontractors during its final months, the start date for them to begin using E-Verify has been delayed multiple times. When President Barack Obama took office, he ordered additional review of the system. After six months, the Obama administration and the DHS decided to push ahead with the expansion of E-Verify.
After the E-Verify rule takes effect on September 8, employers that are awarded federal contracts that include the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) E-Verify clause will have to verify the employment eligibility of all their employees (including current workers) through E-Verify. However, federal contractors may not use E-Verify to verify current employees until the rule becomes effective and they are awarded a contract that includes the FAR E-Verify clause.

Women take over job market

Women are on the verge of outnumbering men in the workforce for the first time, a historic reversal caused by long-term changes in women's roles and massive job losses for men during this recession.
Women held 49.83% of the nation's 132 million jobs in June and they're gaining the vast majority of jobs in the few sectors of the economy that are growing, according to the most recent numbers available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The gender transformation is especially remarkable in local government's 14.6 million-person workforce. Cities, schools, water authorities and other local jurisdictions have cut 86,000 men from payrolls during the recession — while adding 167,000 women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"Unemployment among men isn't going to last forever," says University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan. "People will move from construction and manufacturing to industries that are creating new jobs." Mulligan expects the portion of jobs held by women to peak slightly above 50% this year, then drop below half when the economy recovers and more men find work.

Google testing HR algorithm

Google thinks it will be able to tell which of its employees are going to quit, maybe even before they know.
The company revealed Tuesday that it is using its fabled data-collection and analysis powers for more than just search results. The Wall Street Journal reported that Google has developed an algorithm for assessing the number of employees likely to turn their back on the free lunches and multicolored walls of Google's Mountain View, Calif., campus in hopes of convincing the best of those folks to stay.
A few years ago, Silicon Valley workers were flocking to Google, and the company was hiring like mad. The world has changed, however, and Google is no longer automatically seen as the best place for a budding young coder or entrepreneur to hone their talents--especially as the stock price has declined since its late 2007 heights.
As a result, Google has seen recent defections to companies du jour such as Twitter and Facebook, and is determined to retain its best people, according to a company representative quoted by the Journal. The algorithm is still in testing (insert joke about Google's beta culture here), but the idea seems to be to identify disengaged employees before they lose interest in staying with Google.
It's almost like a kinder, gentler version of the "forced ranking" Six Sigma program that encouraged companies to regularly fire the bottom 10 percent of their employees to get rid of the malcontents. Google's not going down that road, but nor is it shy about using quantitative analysis to categorize its workforce.
The algorithm works by taking data from staff pay history, promotion history and employee reviews and appraisals of its 20,000 staff worldwide.The programme is still in the test phases, so the company is not ready to share information about the technical workings of the system, but a spokesman told HR magazine: "As anyone who has observed Google over the years knows, we are serious about keeping our employees happy.
"The work we do in predictive attrition helps us find situations that may increase the likelihood of some ‘Googlers' leaving the company so that managers and HR staff can work on avoiding those very situations. "These efforts don't identify specific people at risk of leaving but instead focus on the less obvious factors that may contribute to the decision to leave the company."Google does not intend to use the algorithm to prevent employees who wish to leave the company from doing so, but hopes to find out which employees are feeling demotivated so training and recognition can be used more strategically.