Legal Issues In Workforce

The early 21st century will perhaps be remembered for being one of business’ most peculiar phenomenon: a national economic slump, precipitated by the failure of many dot com companies and technology businesses, laying off a multitude of workers in its wake.   One company announces sweeping cuts in its workforce expecting big savings, and soon a horde of others follow suit.   The technological organization who jumped on board with all the dot com hype and put all their eggs in that basket, soon realized the mistake they had made.  
Severance packages, including severance pay, accrued vacation pay, and outplacement services play a major role in increasing the gap between the actual and expected savings.   The misery for companies does not end here.   Two out of every five companies that downsized in the last nineties have had to contend with discrimination chares as well.   Between 1995 and 1998, people claiming age discrimination were awarded an average of $219,000 according to Pennsylvania-Based Jury Verdict Research.     Because of this, companies are now forced to strategically think through all their layoffs and live in fear that they will not be charged with a discrimination lawsuit.  
FastServe Inc.
FastServe Inc is a $25 million, 350-person strong company involved in direct marketing of branded sports apparel.   To focus exclusively on America’s sport-crazy Generation Y segment, FastServe opened up two online marketing & distribution channels, one for boys and one for girls.   Ten percent of FastServe’s workforce was moved in order to manage the online distribution.   Unfortunately, soon after the web sites went live, technology began to prove to be a huge problem for FastServe.   The website’s design and layout attracted and appealed to the Generation Y customers, but were so cumbersome to download that potential buyers were not making enough transactions for the technological investments to be viable.   To overcome the decrease of sales, FastServe has decided to...