It’s 10:30 on a Tuesday morning.  You’ve finished the morning Staff Meeting, answered twenty seven emails, checked Facebook and are now sitting down to write some employee reviews. Then you get it.  A letter from an attorney.  Not your attorney.  An attorney representing the employee you terminated last week.  The employee you fired after his...

“I’m being sued by a former employee. He came back drunk from lunch, crashed his forklift, and destroyed $1,000.00 of product. Our security cameras caught it all and it was clearly his gross negligence that caused the accident. I fired him on the spot and took the $1,000.00 out of his final pay. I’m in...

Internships have been receiving special attention lately with the popular Robert Di Nero movie The Intern and a lawsuit brought against Fox Searchlight Pictures by former unpaid interns claiming compensation. Against this backdrop of entertainment and law, what is an internship? What are the expectations legally and from a work perspective? What is an internship...

With the drawdown of the U.S. Military, many veterans are entering the workforce. Many public employers, and some private employers, have gone out of their way to hire veterans. While most of these are highly motivated and capable employees, there are some terminations from time to time. Minnesota Statutes section 197.46, the Veterans Preference Act,...

Minnesota legislators and legislatures often refer to even numbered years as “bonding” and odd years as “budgeting.” However, there is no constitutional or other legal provision requiring “bonding” vs. “budgeting” years. The informal distinction simply means that in odd years, the legislature hopes to pass a two year budget. In odd years, with the budget...

MikLin Enterprises, the owner of 10 Jimmy John’s restaurants, recently learned the hard way that retaliating against employees who are engaged in legally protected activity can have serious consequences. In recent years the International Workers of the World (the “Union”), began organizing Jimmy John’s workers at the approximately 1,4000 restaurants nationwide, and 40-50 in the...