Law360 (subscription) has published a piece examining common employee management mistakes employers can avoid. The publication spoke with some of the nation’s top employment attorneys to gain insight on how companies can side-step wage and hour violations during the pandemic and beyond.
When employers handle employee complaints, worker-side attorneys said they tend to only focus on remedying a single worker’s complaint rather than zooming out and checking the entire system for what may well be related problems.
Lieff Cabraser partner Daniel M. Hutchinson said employers should consider thinking about a worker’s complaints “as the canary in the coal mine that could potentially be a reason to make broader changes or to get at cultural issues at the company.” Hutchinson placed this approach under a framework of “happiness.” A common theme among Hutchinson’s employee clients, he noted, is that they may have a legal issue with wage and hour compliance, but oftentimes it’s not the only issue, and legal action could have been avoided had the worker been otherwise happy with the employer.
“I don’t think employers pay enough attention to making their employees happy,” he added. “Focus on having employees be happy, having them be able to voice issues before they get to a point where they’re going to talk to an attorney.”
Read the full article on Law360’s (subscription) website.
About Daniel Hutchinson
The Chair of Lieff Cabraser’s employment practice group, Daniel M. Hutchinson specializes in complex class and collective actions that advance the public interest. As a partner at Lieff Cabraser, Daniel served as lead or co-lead counsel on cases that recovered over $800 million for his clients in a variety of industries and across myriad discrimination, unpaid wages, ERISA, consumer protection, and financial fraud matters.
He is an advocate for underrepresented and disadvantaged communities, and has litigated cases involving unfair employment practices against immigrants. Daniel has pursued a series of consumer protection cases against major banks and financial services providers. His efforts have helped result in the largest monetary settlement in the history of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and ended harassing automated calls to millions of consumers. Prior to joining Lieff Cabraser in 2005, Daniel graduated from Berkeley Law and Brown University.
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