Workplace

A lawsuit filed in San Diego County Superior Court on Friday accuses Costco Wholesale Corp. of breaking California labor law by routinely keeping employees from going home each night for 15 minutes as managers remove jewelry from cases and check registers. The policy, the suit says, amounts to false imprisonment.

The Supreme Court served notice Friday it may make a far-reaching change in civil rights law this year and knock down a pair of long-standing rules that give special protections to minorities in the workplace and in the voting booth. The justices, after meeting privately, announced they had voted to hear two cases that concern the lingering role of race in American life. The cases could put the court on a collision course with the incoming Obama administration.

The first bill that lands on Barack Obama's desk after he becomes president could provide him with an opportunity to make an immediate mark on civil rights. Democrats in Congress are pushing legislation that would undo a controversial 2007 decision by the Supreme Court that tossed out a workplace discrimination suit brought by a female supervisor at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.

Hours before he walked into his workplace at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center with two handguns to fatally shoot his bosses and then himself, Mario Ramirez went about his morning routine with his usual kindness and good cheer, his sister-in-law said. He gave his children breakfast, took them to school (he had moved his family to Alhambra because its classrooms seemed safer than those in Boyle Heights) and returned home to get ready for his job as a technician at the hospital's pharmacy.

The battle of youth versus age is one of the defining economic struggles of our era. Therefore, speaking as someone who hasn't been referred to as "the Kid" for a decade or three, I would like to salute Capt. Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III, 57, for holding up my team in the war of the generations. Capt. Sullenberger is the pilot who ditched his crippled airliner in New York's Hudson River a week ago, saving every soul on board.

Michael Hanik used to have 12 employees, a warehouse and trucks to run his medical devices catalog company. But four years ago, he turned to the Internet to look for ways to reduce overhead costs for his Rockville, Md.-based Total Medical Systems. He now has just three employees on the payroll but as many as 50 contractors working for him, some of them known as virtual assistants.

So let me ask you a question about the tip jar. I had a little thing with the calzone guy this week. I go to drop a buck in the tip jar and just as I am about to drop it in, he looks the other way. And then when I am leaving, he gives me this look [like] thanks for nothing. I mean if they don't notice it, what's the point? -- George Costanza, "Seinfeld," 1996 -- It may be a hand-painted tin can, a stray paper cup or a corporate-issue plexiglass cube, but it's becoming a fixture: the tip jar.

Forget salaries, expense accounts or keys to the executive washroom. Employee loyalty is won or lost over the cleanliness of the bathrooms and the amount of sticky goo on the carpet. One in three workers surveyed recently said they had accepted a job -- or quit one -- because of the most basic working conditions. The respondents' chief complaints by far: the state of the indoor atmosphere, the gripes being about either hot-as-the-tropics heating or Antarctic air conditioning.

Four men were shot dead Tuesday afternoon at an auto junkyard in northern Santa Barbara County, apparent victims of a workplace attack, authorities said. In a wild scene that sent workers and customers fleeing for their lives, police said, the shooter killed the men with a semiautomatic handgun, pausing at one point between rounds to reload. A suspect was later taken into custody. "There were a lot of customers on the property, and they were running outside," said Lt. Dan Ast.

Are you a new graduate about to get your first job? Shanti Atkins would like a few words with you. An attorney who works with companies that want to avoid employment gaffes that can lead to lawsuits, Atkins has seen too many young workers sabotage their careers by confusing what's cool in school with what's OK in the office. "There are profound differences between acceptable work behavior and acceptable school behavior," said Atkins, 33.