With a new year comes new laws – even for the workplace. To that end, I'd urge everyone to hop online and check out any new laws that may have gone into effect in your part of the planet. After doing a quick check myself, I caught a glimpse of what the law in California now looks like.
For example, if you are addicted to your hand-held input device (I'll leave the copyrighted name of the device out of this post), you might be sad / angry / furious to know that you can't send text messages while driving anymore. And, yes, an e-mail is a text message, just like an SMS is.
Also, did you know that in California, if you're an executive, professional, sales and admin people who makes over $100,000 a year, you're exempt from overtime. Don't laugh software engineers; most of you are now exempt from overtime if you make $75k per year.
Employers, bad news, even though I'm sure none of you ever do this – it's now illegal to ask an employee to fill out a knowingly wrong time sheet as a condition of payment.
These are just some of the new things going on in the world of work in 2009. I'm sure that the new laws in California are quite tame compared to some of the other laws you're likely to find!