San Francisco Employment Law Blog

Are you wondering what you can do to help stop racist comments and jokes in the workplace?

Racism is a community issue and it will only end when it becomes clearly unacceptable by community standards. That will only happen when enough people decide to take a stand and call out racism whenever they hear it.

Performance improvement plans, or PIPs, are part of an employer's paper trail. PIPs are supposed to be tools that employers can use to address deficiencies in an employee's work. They're also supposed to be tools that help the employee understand exactly what he or she has to do in order to bring his or her performance up to expectations.

In reality, they're usually part of a paper trail that employers try to build to insulate themselves against wrongful termination claims. It's not uncommon for the PIP to be so unrealistic in its goals that employees subjected to them quit in frustration. Those that remain seldom manage to meet the lofty requirements necessary to show improvement as given in the PIP.

Are sex and gender the same? Is gender immutable and fixed or subjective?

These are some of the theoretical questions that have to be answered and defined into law because they have real-world implications for the nation's transgender community -- which has become increasingly visible and vocal over the last decade alone.

Did the former personnel chief of a federal agency treat his office as like a private hunting ground for women? Did he create a culture that treated women as mere objects -- many hired on solely because they were viewed as attractive possible partners for the personnel chief and his friends?

That's the allegations against a former official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The official recently resigned after an internal investigation into the agency's sexual harassment problem.