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The Promise and Perils of Affinity Groups; Or, How Not to Bargain with your Employee Resource Group

A properly structured and implemented Affinity Group (AKA Employee Resource Group) is a powerful tool in an employer’s Diversity Equity & Inclusion tool belt. But, unwary employers may risk violating the National Labor Relations Act if they bargain with an Affinity Group. In this month’s podcast, Alyesha Asghar Dotson discusses the do’s and don’ts of interacting with an active Affinity Group within your organization.
  




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Rules for UK Visit Visas and Permitted Paid Activities Have Changed – Here's How

In the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Autumn Statement, Jeremy Hunt promised that “the government will expand the business Visitor rules to allow businesspeople to engage in a wider range of permitted activities and paid engagements, to take effect from January 2024. The government will also explore further reforms to the business visitor rules during 2024.”

The first of these changes took effect from January 31, 2024. They were not a major reform of the business and other permitted activities that can be carried out on a visit visa, but there are some important changes.




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The Accidental Success of the NLRA: How a Law about Unions Achieved Its Goals by Giving Us Fewer Unions

Alexander Thomas MacDonald explains how, through a century of trial and error, labor law has been wildly successful in giving us the most peaceful labor market in history. 

The Federalist Society

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How Union Tactics Sideline Businesses and Workers

Alex MacDonald discusses how a new study reveals how some union practices prioritize maintaining their political influence over delivering benefits.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce

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How ongoing worker shortages highlight an ‘urgent need’ for upskilling

Shannon Meade and Michael Lotito discuss key issues that employers are facing now, according to Littler’s Workplace Policy Institute’s 2024 Labor Day Report.

Human Resource Executive

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How to Avoid a Claim of 'Pretaliation'

Jeff Nowak and Rich Falcone talk through a hypothetical HR dilemma involving a workplace complaint.

SHRM Online

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Dear Littler: How should we handle anonymous complaints?

Dear Littler,




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How should a company intelligently adopt employment-focused artificial intelligence, or AI tools?




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Alex MacDonald Explains How Unions' Right to "Exclusive Representation" May Be Unconstitutional

Alexander MacDonald discusses the filing of an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court asking the court to clarify a prior 1984 decision which, if successful, could weaken a new form of “exclusive representation” for unions.

Labor Union News (Podcast)

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Hybrid Working 'Here To Stay,' Littler Survey Shows

Raoul Parekh talks about current workplace issues reflected in Littler’s 2023 European Employer Survey Report, including remote work and a four-day work week.

Law360

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Statutory paternity pay uptake falls amid financial pressures, stats show

Mark Callaghan says the new UK government should increase Statutory Paternity Pay “in excess of inflation,” because it would benefit businesses and families alike.

People Management

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Navigating New Nevada Laws: What to Know and How to Prepare




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How to Identify Forced Labor in Supply Chains

Donald Dowling says abusive labor practices are a huge problem around the world, and often the smaller local manufacturers, miners and growers within countries that are committing labor abuses are bigger problems than the multinational firms.

SHRM Online

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How can employers address varying sensitivities to DEI issues in a multinational workforce?




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Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders and Equal Pay: What the Hit Netflix Show Tells UK Employers

The latest binge watch for many of us at GQ|Littler was the Netflix hit, “America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders,” which follows a year in the life of NFL’s Dallas Cowboys cheerleading team.




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Psychedelics and Marijuana on the Ballot: How Should Employers Prepare for Potential Legalization?

Voters in several states will decide whether marijuana or, in one case, psychedelic substances should be legal in the upcoming November 5, 2024 general election. Employers should keep their eyes on these ballot measures and prepare for questions regarding changes to workplace policies if some or all of them pass. A rundown of the ballot measures in these jurisdictions follows.




how

Background Checks: How to Protect Yourself

Rod Fliegel talks about employee background screenings – the FCRA issues for employers to consider, the importance of providing a pre-adverse action notice and common mistakes employers make.

Workest by Zenefits

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Dear Littler: How should employers revise their releases, separation agreements, and settlement agreements in light of the Speak Out Act?

Dear Littler: Considering the recent passage of the federal Speak Out Act limiting the use of pre-dispute nondisclosure and non-disparagement clauses involving sexual assault and sexual harassment claims, what impact will this have on our template releases, separation agreements, and litigation settlement agreements? How do you recommend we revise those documents?

                                         —Revising Releases

Dear Revising,




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New Legislation and New PAGA in CA, New Administration in DC – How Can Employers Thrive in 2025?




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How Will the Supreme Court’s Review of Two Affirmative Action Cases Affect Employers?

  • On October 31, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court heard two cases that will determine the legality of affirmative action in college admissions decisions.
  • During oral arguments, Justice Elena Kagan raised the issue of whether employers may consider the benefits of diversity when making hiring decisions.




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How The High Court Shook Up Workplace Bias Law In 2023

Jim Paretti says two U.S. Supreme Court rulings on discrimination law that changed how employers evaluate religious accommodation requests and ended affirmative action in higher education will affect employers for years to come.

Law360 Employment Authority

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Dartmouth basketball vote shows unionization ‘can happen anywhere,’ attorney says

Tyler Sims discusses the potential wage-and-hour implications of Dartmouth College’s men’s basketball team voting to form what may become the NCAA’s first-ever athlete labor union.

HR Dive

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NLRB General Counsel Suggests How Colleges and Universities Can Satisfy NLRA Disclosure Obligations Without Violating FERPA

Colleges and universities that employ their own students face conflicts about how to protect student information, as required by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), while disclosing information about student-employees who seek to unionize, as required by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

On August 6, 2024, the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel issued a memorandum with her advice about how higher education institutions should handle this dilemma.




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What to Expect and How to Comply with Senate Bill 553




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How Employers Can Best Protect Themselves in Montana




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Vaccines and Returning to Work: How the Pandemic Is Changing ADA Workplace Accommodations - Utah Edition




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Veterans Day 2024: How Military Service Helps Us Serve Littler Clients

Emily Haigh, U.S. Army veteran and co-founder of Littler's Veterans Initiative, speaks with Littler attorneys Michael Kibbe, Caroline Lutz and Jonathan Heller, about how their military experience has had a positive impact on their legal practice.
  




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Ontario, Canada Appellate Court Provides Guidance to Employers on How to Draft Employment Settlement Documents

  • The Court of Appeal for Ontario found that settlement documents signed after an employee separated from employment prevented him from suing for the value of vested stock options.
  • The OCA emphasized that the employee had executed the settlement documents with the benefit of legal advice and that they clearly released the employee’s entitlement to the damages claimed.




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Crash Course in U.S. Employment Law: How a Multinational Based Outside the United States Can Avoid Big Mistakes Managing a U.S. Workforce

  • Multinationals based outside the United States that enter the U.S. market and employ U.S. staff tend to encounter hurdles, and to make mistakes, because the U.S system of labor/employment regulation is of a fundamentally different character from those of every other country in the world.  




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Strikes in the Age of Automation and AI: How HR Can Prepare for the Future

Bradford Kelley talks about how important it is for employers to create effective AI policies.

SHRM

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An Accidental Outcome? Alex MacDonald returns to discuss how the NLRA’s success has resulted in fewer unions & what might happen under a new administration in DC

Alex MacDonald discusses his article “The Accidental Success of the NLRA: How a Law About Unions Achieved Its Goals by Giving Us Fewer Unions” on a podcast.

Labor Union News

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How A California Intersectionality Law Might Boost Equal Pay

Joy Rosenquist says a new law enshrining the principle of intersectionality in California’s anti-discrimination statutes will have a substantial impact on equal pay litigation.

Law360 Employment Authority

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How different would Harris, Trump be for HR? 5 areas to watch

Michael Lotito, Jorge Lopez, Jim Paretti and Shannon Meade share their outlooks on the biggest changes that could be coming down the pike for HR after Election Day.

HR Executive

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How The Presidential Election Will Affect Workplace AI Regs

Bradford Kelley, Jim Paretti and Eduardo Reyes Chavez say a new administration could lead to changes in AI compliance requirements for employers nationwide.

Law360

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How and why SMEs get involved in ETSI

How and why SMEs get involved in ETSI

Sophia Antipolis, 2 April 2020

Within ETSI, small and medium enterprises account for more than 25% of our membership, they represent 35 nationalities and over 50% of them hold official positions in our technical groups.

Read More...




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Confinement: how ETSI helps its members and staff to work remotely round the world

Confinement: how ETSI helps its members and staff to work remotely round the world

Sophia Antipolis, 15 April 2020

With over 200 e-Meetings organized by ETSI and 3GPP technical groups in March (with up to 300 participants per meeting!) and with the entire ETSI staff now working remotely, the ETSI IT department has stepped up to ensure that all core standardization activities can continue to run smoothly during the COVID-19 lockdown. Even if the situation we are in is exceptional, e-Meetings are not new to ETSI groups. The ETSI IT department has been able to lean on their established business continuity plan to adapt and up-scale our online services, in these unusual times.

Read More...




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ETSI Event: How to teach the Next Generation of ICT Standards People

ETSI Event: How to teach the Next Generation of ICT Standards People

Sophia Antipolis, 12 October 2022

On 6 October, ETSI organized its first workshop dedicated to present the full teaching material for ICT standardization, available from our website. The ETSI education about standardization programme started in 2016. This event was addressed to educators at university level and professionals. The audience comprised national standards organizations, university professors and Intellectual Property experts.

Read More...




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ETSI IoT week highlights how ICT standards can help sustainability

ETSI IoT week highlights how ICT standards can help sustainability

Sophia Antipolis, 17 October 2022

Last week ETSI hosted the 2022 ETSI IoT Week event, focused on “Pursuing the Digital and Green Transformation”. 52 speakers from industry, research, universities, cities and other SDOs demonstrated, with concrete examples, how ICT standards can help reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the European Green Deal to an audience from 22 countries around the world.

Read More...




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How cybersecurity standards support the evolving EU legislative landscape

Sophia Antipolis, 8 February 2023

On 7 February, the European Standards Organizations (ESOs), CEN, CENELEC and ETSI, joined forces with ENISA, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, to organise their 7th annual conference. The hybrid conference took place at the Brussels Renaissance Hotel and focused on “European Standardization in support of the EU cybersecurity legislation”.

Read More...




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How to Read a Slave Narrative

New essay by William L. Andrews just added to Freedom's Story: Teaching African American Literature and History, TeacherServe from the National Humanities Center.




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How Slavery Affected African American Families

New essay, "How Slavery Affected African American Families," by Heather Andrea Williams, associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, added to Freedom's Story: Teaching African American Literature and History, TeacherServe from the National Humanities Center.




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SpotOn London 2013: How are online tools changing science education?

The place we’re in as a society is a crowded field of scattered tools and




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How does agricultural productivity growth affect agrifood system transformation goals?




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How should governments respond to crises? Rapid response using RIAPA modeling system




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How To Protect Your Cloud Environments and Prevent Data Breaches

As organizations create and store more data in the cloud, security teams must ensure the data is protected from cyberthreats. Learn more about what causes data breaches and about the best practices you can adopt to secure data stored in the cloud.

With the explosion of data being generated and stored in the cloud, hackers are creating new and innovative attack techniques to gain access to cloud environments and steal data. A review of recent major data breaches shows us that data thieves are using social engineering, hunting for exposed credentials, looking for unpatched vulnerabilities and misconfigurations and employing other sophisticated techniques to breach cloud environments.

A look at recent cloud data-breach trends

Here are some takeaways from major data breaches that have occurred this year:

  • Managing the risk from your third-parties – partners, service providers, vendors – has always been critical. It’s even more so when these trusted organizations have access to your cloud environment and cloud data. You must make sure that your third-parties are using proper cloud-security protections to safeguard their access to your cloud data and to your cloud environment.
  • Secure your identities. We’ve seen major data breaches this year tracked down to simple missteps like failing to protect highly-privileged admin accounts and services with multi-factor authentication (MFA). 
  • Adopt best practices to prevent ransomware attacks, and to mitigate them if you get hit by one. Ransomware gangs know that a surefire way to pressure victims into paying ransoms is to hijack their systems and threaten to expose their sensitive data. 

So, how can you strengthen your data security posture against these types of attacks?

  1. Implement a "zero trust" security framework that requires all users, whether inside or outside the organization, to be authenticated, authorized and continuously validated before being granted or maintaining access to data. This framework should allow only time-limited access and be based on the principle of least privilege, which limits access and usage to the minimum amount of data required to perform the job.
  2. Use a cloud data security posture management (DSPM) solution to enforce the security framework through continuous monitoring, automation, prioritization and visibility. DSPM solutions can help organizations identify and prioritize data security risks based on their severity, allowing them to focus their resources on the most critical issues.
  3. Regularly conduct risk assessments to detect and remediate security risks before they can be exploited by hackers. This can help prevent data breaches and minimize the impact of any security incidents that do occur.
  4. Train employees on security best practices, including how to create strong passwords, how to identify risks and how to report suspicious activity.

By following these recommendations, organizations can significantly reduce their risk of a data breach and improve handling sensitive data belonging to their organization. As more and more data moves to the cloud and hackers become more sophisticated, it's essential to prioritize security and take proactive measures to protect against data risks. 

Learn more




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Securing Financial Data in the Cloud: How Tenable Can Help

Preventing data loss, complying with regulations, automating workflows and managing access are four key challenges facing financial institutions. Learn how Tenable can help.

Imagine a bustling bank, made not of bricks and mortar, but of a swirling mass of data in the cloud. Account numbers, transaction histories and personally identifiable information (PII) zip across servers, powering the financial world. Holding all this sensitive data requires tremendous care. Therefore, securing this sensitive information is paramount.

This is where Tenable Cloud Security steps in, offering a data security shield specifically designed for the unique needs of financial institutions.

The challenge: A data deluge demands vigilance

Financial institutions generate massive volumes of data daily. While the public cloud offers unparalleled capacity to store such data, along with agility and scalability, the cloud also expands the attack surface. Legacy cybersecurity solutions are often unable to manage — let alone secure — the sheer volume of data and the variety of ways it is accessed, leaving organizations exposed to malicious actors. At the same time, financial institutions must keep up with new and evolving compliance standards and regulations set forth by governing bodies. Financial institutions need a security platform that helps them protect their data and maintain compliance.

Tenable Cloud Security’s advantage: Seeing beyond the walls

Tenable Cloud Security actively scrutinizes every corner of the cloud data vault, continuously and automatically.

"Without [Tenable Cloud Security], we would've been virtually blind to risks and threats impacting our sensitive data. [Tenable Cloud Security] allows us to preempt any issues and meet the requirements we're receiving from our business partners, with minimal effort.

— VP Security at a leading Fintech platform

Here's how Tenable empowers financial institutions:

  • Protecting sensitive data: Tenable doesn't just guard the door; it knows what's inside and how to best protect it. It identifies and labels all data, like financial records and social security numbers, understanding its sensitivity and prioritizing its protection.
  • Continuous monitoring: Imagine guards constantly scanning every inch of the vault. Tenable does the same digitally, using advanced technology to constantly search for suspicious activity and potential breaches. Any unusual movement of the data, either exfiltration or copying to a different and inaccessible location, triggers an alarm, allowing for immediate intervention.
  • Policy enforcement: Just like a vault needs clear access protocols, so does your data. Tenable automates setting and enforcing cybersecurity policies across the entire cloud, ensuring everyone plays by the book and no unauthorized hands touch the valuables.
  • Following mandated regulations: Financial institutions juggle a complex set of regulations and industry standards like the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS). Tenable simplifies compliance with a host of international regulations by providing timely reports and audit trails.

Beyond traditional security: More than just a lock

Modern technology stacks for data storage require a modern cybersecurity stack. Traditional security solutions are unable to address the unique risks associated with storing data in cloud technologies. Financial organizations that leverage Tenable’s data security platform are able to meet existing and future challenges, including:

  • Preventing data loss: Early detection and prevention of unauthorized data access can help organizations minimize financial losses and reputational damage, keeping valuable assets safe from even the most cunning thieves.
  • Complying with regulations: Automated reports and adherence to the most stringent regulations and industry standards ensure compliance, saving time and resources.
  • Automating workflows: Tenable automates tasks and provides deeper insights into how data behaves, enabling organizations to free up their valuable resources for other endeavors and make their security teams more efficient.
  • Managing access: Just like knowing who has access to the vault is crucial. Tenable tracks who and what has access to data, ensuring only authorized parties can handle the data.

The future of financial security is data-centric

Tenable Cloud Security's data-centric approach positions it as a valuable partner, not just for guarding the perimeter but for understanding the inner workings of the vault and the most sensitive data within it. By leveraging Tenable’s capabilities, financial institutions can confidently embrace the cloud while ensuring the highest level of security for their most valuable assets — their data.

To learn more about how you can secure your data




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SpotOn London 2012 Storify: Fixing the fraud: how do we safeguard science from misconduct?

#solo12fraud




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SpotOn London 2012 Storify: Tackling the terabyte: how should research adapt to the era of big data?

Here is a Storify round up of the SpotOn London session: Tackling the terabyte: how should




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SpotOn London 2013 Storify: Open, Portable, Decoupled – How should Peer Review change?

Here is a Storify collating the online conversation around the Open, Portable, Decoupled – How should




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SpotOn London Storify: How are online tools changing science education?

Here is a Storify collecting the online conversations from the “How are online tools changing