Court orders Wal-Mart to pay $4.4 million in case of racial profiling

Next month, the U.S. Department of Labor is expected to propose a revision of the Fair Labor Standards Act regulations regarding the overtime salary threshold. The threshold is one of the factors used to determine whether a salaried employee is exempt from overtime pay for hours worked in excess of 40 hours per week. 

Franklin v. Whole Foods Market Group Inc. et al (U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 20-04935) involves a man who served 23 years in prison following a conviction for second degree murder. Upon his release, he applied for a grocery delivery job at Cornucopia Logistics, which serves Amazon and Whole Foods. Upon discovering that the job applicant, Henry Franklin, had misled the company by answering “no” when asked if he had a criminal record, the company denied him employment, citing the applicant’s untruthful answer as the reason for not hiring him.

Former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski was sentenced this week to 18 months in prison after admitting he stole trade secrets from Google related to self-driving car technology.

In sentencing Levandowski to jail time, U.S. District Judge William Alsup sent a clear message to would-be IP thieves: brilliance is no excuse for theft. In denying the Levandowski defense team’s request for home confinement in lieu of jail, the Court refused to “give a green light to every future brilliant engineer to steal trade secrets.”