USC SHRM Monthly
December 2014
In This Issue
• US Foods Site Visit
• Obama Plan Grants Work Authori-
zation to Nearly 5 Million
• Egg-Freezing Benefit from Facebook, Apple Raises Workplace Questions
• HR, Beware the Wayward App
Month In Review
• SHRM Meeting and 2nd Year Panel - Nov 19
• CSHRM Holiday Party - Dec 2
Club Contact Information
• USC SHRM Website: http://tinyurl.
com/le2vxnv
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.
com/groups/ 163924133632918/
• Instagram: shrm_usc
Coming Up
• Information about CSHRM job and
mentee opportunities!
US Foods Site
Visit
Ginny Oliver
On October 24, 2014,
ten MHR students
along with SHRM
Advisor, Ann Wiser,
attended a site visit
to US Foods in Lexington, SC. Students
had the opportunity to meet with several line leaders as well as the HR Manager,
Cheryl McLaughlin. They took a tour of the
massive facility to get a sense of the scale
of their operation. Fork lifts whizzed by as
students saw where all the food is stored, including the icy freezer section. The managers answered questions on topics including
logistical issues, staffing for multiple shifts
and cold conditions, and compensating employees to balance efficiency with accuracy.
After the tour, SHRM members were treated
to a wonderful lunch prepared by Chef Ryan
McNutt. Chef Ryan gave an impromptu presentation about his background and the culinary market, including an array of fabulous
ice sculptures. The afternoon closed with a
chance for some Q & A and closing remarks.
Obama Plan Grants Work Authorization
to Nearly 5 Million
Employers must undergo balancing act
during implementation period
By Roy Maurer 11/21/2014
Nearly five million undocumented immigrants residing in the United States
would be eligible for work authorization under an executive action announced by President Barack Obama.
Announced Nov. 20, 2014, the president’s
actions will allow almost half of the nation’s
estimated 11-12 million undocumented
immigrants three years of deportation relief and work authorization. While experts
agree that U.S. employers will benefit from
a suddenly larger labor pool, HR will have
to be very careful to ensure compliance
with employment verification requirements
during the implementation period. “It’ll
be a balancing act,” said David Grunblatt,
partner and head of the Immigration & Nationality Group at law firm Proskauer. “Employers will be caught between a rock and
hard place, as they have to be final arbiters
on what the law is when employees present themselves as undocumented,” he said.
The president’s plan also included several policy initiatives aimed at “streamlining” the employment-based immigrant
visa system, such as long-awaited guidance clarifying “specialized knowledge”
for L-1Bs, H-4 spouse work authorization,
increasing worker portability for those
waiting for a green card, expanding opportunities for foreign students and entrepreneurs, and modernizing the labor certification process for employment-based visas.
“The president should be lauded for unveiling many positive employment-based initiatives,” said Angelo Paparelli, partner in the
Business Immigration Practice Group of Seyfarth Shaw, based in Los Angeles and New
York. “These will go a long way to improving America’s dysfunctional immigration
system, but the unveiling omits key provisions and reveals just how daunting the challenge of implementation will be,” he added.
The announcement drew sharp criticism
from congressional Republicans, who said
the unilateral move has destroyed hopes
for a legislative overhaul of the immigration system. House Judiciary Committee
Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., announced
that his committee will hold a hearing
on the president’s action Dec. 2, 2014.
Deportation Protection Expanded
The president’s plan will offer over four million undocumented individuals relief from
deportation and provide them the opportunity to apply for temporary work authorization under a program called Deferred
Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA).
Undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and
legal permanent residents would be able to
legally live and work in the U.S. for a period
of three years, if they have lived in the country for at least five years, since Jan. 1, 2010.
Details about eligibility requirements for
DAPA and how to apply will be finalized within the next six months but eligibility will include registering, submitting biometric data,
passing a criminal background check and
agreeing to pay taxes. What types of crimes
would render someone ineligible and what
is meant by paying taxes was left unclear.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Continued on Page 3
Egg-Freezing Benefit from Facebook,
Apple Raises Workplace Questions
Does paying to freeze eggs suggest
motherhood and career are incompatible?
By Dana Wilkie 10/16/2014
With the decision by Apple and Facebook to offer company insurance coverage to women who want to freeze their
eggs come questions about the message
this may send to women who pursue
careers at prominent tech companies.
For instance: Is an employer paying to freeze
a woman’s eggs a way to suggest motherhood and a demanding job are incompatible?
Or: Might the existence of an egg-freezing benefit pressure women to delay having children in favor of their careers?
“It’s complicated,” said Ellen Galinsky,
president of the Families and Work Institute. “Egg freezing is very expensive, so
this is a nice benefit. You want this option
for people, but you don’t want to send the
message that ‘we don’t expect you to be able
to manage’ ” both parenting and a career.
Apple and Facebook are among the first
companies to offer the option to freeze eggs
as part of their benefits. Those who support the practice say it gives women more
control over their work and personal lives,
allowing them to delay motherhood until
it’s the right time for them or their careers.
“My sense is that the companies are sincere about trying to provide women more
control over when they choose to start families,” said David G. Allen, distinguished
professor of management at the University
of Memphis’ Fogelman College of Business
and Economics. “However, I would be hesitant to frame it in terms of a tool for leveling compensation and career progression
for women. That could send the signal that
Continued on Page 2
HR, Beware the Wayward App
New applications can both disrupt and
assist employees
By Aliah D. Wright 11/14/2014
We are a world driven by apps.
Apps help us schedule appointments, make
reservations, find taxi cabs, and access our
work hours, attendance and pay information. As more people use mobile devices as
their primary source of communication, HR
is faced with yet another phenomenon to
police: unauthorized apps in the workplace.
According to a news release from
Netskope, a cloud-based security service, apps for use in the workplace usually have strong business features and
back-ups in case of technology failures.
Unfortunately, the release continues, “many
apps in use in enterprises lack sufficient
safeguards, putting data at risk.” Netskope
reports there are an average of 579 apps in
use in each of their clients’ organizations.
More than 88 percent, however, are not enterprise-ready. The quarterly report, issued
in late October 2014, bases its findings on
usage trends—tens of billions of interactions, which it calls cloud app events—
that the company tracked from millions of
users from July through September 2014.
Business leaders’ instinct may be to ban
apps—such as Dropbox, Google Drive,
Trello or social networks people can use
to get work done—but experts say HR
should welcome these new technologies, and create policies to manage them.
After all, as Nielsen reports, U.S. Android
and iPhone users ages 18 and over spend
65 percent more time each month using
apps than they did just two years ago.
Mitigate Risks with Understanding
So what should HR do? “First off, embrace it,” Gartner Research Director Yvette
Cameron said during an interview at
Human Resource Executive magazine’s
17th annual HR Technology Conference
and Exposition in Las Vegas in October.
“And then poll the employees in a positive
way. ‘What are you using? Help us understand the type of things you’re using so we
can develop policies that are more encompassing,’ ” she said. If, for example, “you
find that everybody’s using a to-do app,
maybe HR needs to embrace one officially.
If a lot of your employees are using wellness
[apps], then why not foster some wellness
programs that incorporate the personal technologies,” such as Fitbits or smartwatches that measure and track exercise habits?
Cameron said the use of these apps
may prove to be a “better way to engage
and
connect
with
employees.”
Security Concerns Remain
Use the apps, but with caution, said Jonathan Villa, principal security consultant
for 1030Tech, a consultancy specializing
in the architecture, management, and security of web application environments.
“There are added benefits to using these
service providers, ranging from accessibility to eliminating backup hardware,” he
told SHRM Online. “I would, however, implement a corporate policy governing the
usage/installation of approved software.
Egg-Freeaing Cont
the company believes women need to be
strategic about managing when they have
children or it will hurt their career, but men
should feel free to have children whenever they want without worrying about it. It
might make sense to offer the benefit to
women and spouses to send the message
that the goal is to help all employees manage their family planning, not just encouraging women to put off having children.”
Menlo Park, Calif.-based Facebook started providing the benefit, which applies
to employees and their spouses or domestic partners, in January 2014. The social network offers as much as $20,000
in expenses for egg freezing and related procedures, such as surrogacy.
Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., said it
will offer similar coverage in 2015. In a statement, an Apple spokeswoman said that the
company wants to “empower women … to
do the best work of their lives as they care
for loved ones and raise their families.”
Recruiting and retaining women has been
a challenge for technology companies.
A startling number of women working in science, engineering and technology (SET)—the
same industries that grade schools are urging girls to pursue—are considering leaving
those fields because of gender bias, according to a February 2014 report by the Center
for Talent Innovation, a global think tank.
The think tank discovered that, despite high
ambition and passion for their work, women
in SET fields in the U.S., Brazil, China and India are “languishing in the middle rungs of
their organizations and, as a result, are much
more likely than men to report that they
plan to leave the industry within the year.”
In fact, 32 percent of female SET employees
in the U.S., 22 percent in Brazil, 30 percent in
China and 20 percent in India were considering leaving their fields within a year, according to the report. Among SET senior leaders,
31 percent of women in the U.S., 22 percent
in Brazil, 51 percent in China and 57 percent in India reported that a woman would
never get a top position at their company,
no matter how capable or high-performing.
“I think it’s great that the companies are
offering [egg-freezing benefits], because
clearly some women want it,” said Joan
C. Williams, chairwoman and director
of the UC Hastings Foundation’s Center
for WorkLife Law. “The best case scenario is that the company sends a message
that if you want to use this benefit, that’s
great, and if you don’t, there’s a place for
you at the company as a mother. There
is at this point massively documented
discrimination against [working] mothers. The solution is not to eliminate this
benefit, but to eliminate discrimination.”
The Society for Human Resource Management’s 2014 Employee Benefits survey reveals that 26 percent of U.S. organizations
offer in vitro fertilization coverage to their
employees and 29 percent of U.S. organizations offer employees infertility treatment
coverage other than in vitro. However, the
number of companies offering medical coverage for egg freezing has not been studied.
Williams said she doesn’t expect many companies to follow Facebook’s and Apple’s leads.
“It’s extraordinarily expensive,” she said.
“This is part of Silicon Valley creating organizational cultures that provide huge numbers
of very expensive benefits—many of them
designed to keep people at work longer,” she
said. “This is definitely part of the picture of
free dinners and dry-cleaning at the office.”
Facebook’s and Apple’s media offices didn’t
respond to requests for comment about criticism aired on social media sites that the
benefit could be viewed as a substitute for
creating a workplace where motherhood
is compatible with a demanding career.
However, Facebook spokeswoman Genevieve Grdina told Bloomberg News that
the company offers other benefits to help
workers transition to parenthood when
they’re ready, including nursing rooms,
subsidized day care, four months of paid
parental leave and $4,000 in “baby cash.”
Allen said it’s important that a company’s benefits demonstrate as much support for working parents as for those
who want to delay having families.
“This is a matter of communication and
organizational culture,” he said. “If an organization already has a culture that is
supportive of employees and supportive of
family-friendly benefits, employees would
be more likely to view it as positive and
as just one more way the company is trying to be supportive. On the other hand,
if employees tend to view the company as
prioritizing the bottom line over employee
well-being, especially if women view the
company as not very supportive of work/
family balance issues, then I think the message could be received more negatively.”
Obama Plan Cont.
Services (USCIS) expects to begin accepting applications for DAPA May 19,
2015. Deferred action will grant beneficiaries Social Security numbers and
work permits, but not permanent legal status or a pathway to citizenship.
The new deportation protections are a year
longer than under an existing program,
started in 2012 for younger immigrants,
known as Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals (DACA). Obama said that the
DACA program also would be revised to
provide three years of relief and that the
program would be expanded by moving
the cutoff date by which one must have
arrived to be eligible to Jan. 1, 2010, from
June 15, 2007, and eliminating the upper age limit on qualifying, provided the
applicants entered the U.S. as children.
The White House estimates about
270,000 people will qualify under the
expanded DACA program, bringing
the total number of people eligible for
that program to about 1.5 million. USCIS will begin accepting applications
for the expanded DACA Feb. 18, 2015.
The plan does not include any relief
for parents of DACA recipients, nor
childless undocumented immigrants.
“The deferred action is the splashiest part
of the announcement,” said Kim Thompson, partner in the Atlanta office of Fisher
& Phillips and chair of the firm’s Global
Immigration Practice Group. “For certain
industries more than others, this will be
crucial. But all employers will have access
to a greater pool of workers,” she said.
Industries such as agriculture, food processing, construction and landscaping
will be hugely impacted, experts agreed.
The enforcement mechanism to keep
undocumented workers out of the
workforce would remain unchanged,
however, creating uncertainty during the
program’s implementation time frame.
Federal immigration enforcement officers
will be given new instructions about who
they should target for deportation and
who they shouldn’t, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). But
until work authorizations are processed for
eligible beneficiaries, employers will have
to maintain vigilance about not employing
people that lack the legal right to work.
And more than half of undocumented
workers currently in the country will still
not be covered under this deferred action.
“The most glaring omission involves the
lack of any discretionary deferral of enforcement against employers who become
aware that employees are eligible for or
have applied for DAPA benefits,” said Paparelli. “I foresee a long, rough patch ahead
for employers, from now to the end of 2016,
before businesses can access this huge
but presently unauthorized workforce.” The timeframe for completing the new
pending workload depends on a variety of factors, according to USCIS. “Our
aim is to complete all applications received by the end of next year before the
end of 2016, consistent with our target
processing time of completing review
of applications within approximately one year of receipt,” the agency said.
“I don’t expect you’re going to see employment authorization documents issued
to beneficiaries until late next year,” said
Thompson. “USCIS won’t accept applications until May. The agency takes at least
90 days to process those applications.
With four million applications coming
in, it won’t happen right away,” she said.
Meantime ICE “can and likely will continue its worksite enforcement of the I-9 compliance regime,” said Paparelli. “The DAPA
beneficiaries could be out of a job because,
long before work permits are issued, ICE
may inspect employer records and notify
employers of unauthorized workers whose
employment must be terminated,” he said.
ICE will proceed with their audits and inspections and will expect employers to terminate individuals not authorized to work,
agreed Thompson. “But we might see ICE
willing to work with employers if individuals flagged in an audit are identified for
this deferred action, she qualified. “ICE
may work with employers and provide a
pass, or some period of time for the eligible
worker to apply for the benefit instead of requiring termination. It’s possible,” she said.
What if an employee self-identifies after
receiving authorization? “This will present
a dilemma for the employer,” said Grunblatt. “Should employers update their
records and continue to employ the individual, or terminate them for falsification
of records? We’ll need more guidance on
how employers are expected to update I-9s
or complete new I-9s for these employees.”
Susan Cohen, founder and chair of the
immigration practice at Mintz Levin in
Boston, cited an ICE FAQ that instructs
employers that it is permissible to accept
new identity documents and continue to
employ the individual. “If they self-identify before receiving work authorization,
however, employers have an obligation
to take them off their payroll,” she added.
“I am worried about how we deal with
individuals who self-identify to take advantage of the program, and the impact
on employers waiting for them to apply
for the benefit that will allow them to
work legally,” said Thompson. “Employers will be put in a position where they
are required by law to terminate what
might be a good, long-tenured employee because they self-identified too soon.”
Thompson advised human resources professionals to communicate the announcement to their workforce in a neutral manner,
if at all. “Say that it may benefit ‘someone
you know,’ without pointing people out, to
stay removed from knowing about a person’s undocumented status,” she said. “If
someone comes to HR and starts to talk
about the announcement or the program,
refer them to immigration attorneys or to
the USCIS website, but don’t talk about
it, because you will then be put on notice
about that person’s status. It’s a dangerous
position for employers, trying to help longtime workers and also protect themselves.”
There’s another area of concern buried
deep in the White House announcement
that employers should know about, said
Paparelli. The sentence references an inter-agency working group exploring “ways
to ensure workers can avail themselves of
their labor and employment rights without fear of retaliation.” The throwaway
mention is “likely enhanced worksite
enforcement efforts arising from the administration’s decision to develop greater
cooperation between and among ICE, the
Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, the National Labor Relations Board
and the Justice Department’s Office of Special Counsel for Unfair Immigration-Related Employment Practices,” he said.
Business, Employer Reaction
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce offered
a muted reaction to the president’s announcement, saying that the only way
to reform the immigration system was
through legislation that would include
reforms to the H-2 programs that deal
with workers in agriculture, construction and service industries, employment verification and border security.
The Council for Global Immigration and
the Society for Human Resource Management issued the following statement: “We
appreciate the president’s continued dedication to immigration reform. However,
creating a system that works for employers requires the president and Congress
to work together. We call on our nation’s
leaders to enact reforms that will allow
U.S. employers to recruit and retain top
world talent and provide tools to ensure
the hiring of a legal workforce. Our economy will truly benefit when they have fixed
a broken immigration system that has stifled growth and caused problems for U.S.
employers trying to compete globally.”
This is part of a standard security policy.
As a matter of fact, there are still many
organizations that forbid the use of Dropbox because of the risk of data leakage.”
Villa added that “the data loss risk with
these services is the same with any cloudbased service provider, for example, weak
passwords, unattended or lost laptops,
falling for a phishing attack, etc. A combination of corporate policies and access control measures from the service
provider should be enforced,” he said.
A “least privilege” or “need to know policy” would prevent a compromised account
from providing full access to all documents
or information stored with any of these
service providers, Villa said, adding that
Dropbox and Google Drive offer multifactor authentication to safeguard accounts.
Simply reminding employees to be careful with their smart devices can go a
long way, too, opined Joey Price, CEO
of the HR consultancy Jumpstart:HR.
“Make sure that you train your employees
to log out of apps every time they set their
phone down and to use a special, hardto-guess password that can’t be cracked
by close family members or hackers.”
Trust Employees
David Thielen is chief technology officer and founder of Windward Studios,
and creator of Windward Reports and
the new Enforced Vacation app, which
debuted in October. Enforced Vacation
gives companies the option of allowing
those employees who receive work e-mails
24 hours a day via their smartphones to
shut off notifications or ‘pause’ e-mails
when they’re officially off the clock.
Thielen said his policy is to tell employees to “put whatever you want
on your computer,” but to also be responsible. Allowing employees to use
unsanctioned apps is a “trade off. We
will have problems on the flip side if
somebody finds something that makes
life better for them,” he said. “The
last thing I need to do is take up time
with other people” by policing apps.
“I expect people here to be responsible. I
don’t expect them to be perfect,” he said,
adding that restrictions can “annoy everybody. … If you treat everybody like
children, they’re going to act like children.
If you treat everybody like grown-ups,
they’re going to act like grown-ups.” Thielen added that employees who repeatedly
engage in “problematic” behavior are fired.
Beware Encrypted Apps
So-called disappearing encrypted messenger apps, such as Confide and Wickr,
and anonymous messenger apps, like
Secret and Whisper, may present a new
wrinkle for HR professionals tasked
with keeping sensitive employee information private and minimizing gossip.
“For employers, this means that information is traveling quickly outside of typical corporate controls,” Daniel Schwartz,
a partner at Shipman & Goodwin LLP,
told business law website Law360.
These messenger apps allow users to
anonymously or privately send videos,
messages and photos to other app users. In some cases, users can set a timer
on the messages so they will disappear
in a matter of seconds after they’ve been
read. Confide messages, for example,
disappear as soon as they’ve been read.
Both Wickr and Confide prevent users
from taking screenshots of the messages.
Because messages sent through Wickr
and Confide promise to disappear once
the user has read them, such apps “may
give a false sense of security to employees to engage in misconduct—to send that
dirty picture or funny joke or other inappropriate thing—believing that it will
be destroyed so there is no proof,” Adam
S. Forman, a lawyer with Miller Canfield Paddock & Stone PLC, told Law360.
Snapchat messages are supposed to disappear as well, but earlier this year the company settled charges with the Federal Trade
Commission after it was revealed that
while the messages disappeared from users’ view on their smartphones, they could
be retrieved by third-party apps or by
connecting the smartphone to a computer.
And while HR may be obligated by
law to keep messages and pictures
sent through apps, those legal requirements may not apply to those using
their own devices at work, experts said.
Companies need to recognize, too, that
“this is a phenomenon that isn’t likely to be contained just through aggressive policy and policing,” Maurice Uenuma, CEO for the Council on
CyberSecurity, told SHRM Online.
Using new apps, he said, is simply “what
creative employees do to get their job done.
What [chief information officers] can do is
work with business leaders to provide a
balanced solution that works for the business. This includes providing a useful set
of approved and secure enterprise applications which can be easily and safely provisioned by the staff members themselves,”
he said. “Needless to say, there have to
be policies to limit the introduction of unknown or dangerous tools into the workflow. But that will always happen if there
are no good, secure, user-friendly options
available to help people do their jobs.”