Bergen County Business & Commercial Law Blog

Department stores these days are doing everything they can to earn the business of their customers, and one of the more recognizable figures in home goods in now at the center of a dispute between two big retailers. Martha Stewart Living has long had an exclusive contract with Macy's to sell its wares in their stores. This deal prevented Martha Stewart Living from selling its items in a competitor store, such as J.C. Penney. However, that's exactly what the domestic doyenne and her company now want to do.

It appears that Stewart and her company are trying to get around the language in the 5-year-old contract with Macy's that prevents its items to be offered for sale at one of Macy's competitors. The company's plan is to create specialty stores within J.C. Penney, thus not technically violating the contract. However, this is not satisfactory to Macy's and they filed suit last month to stop the deal from going through.

One of the best ways for a New Jersey business to avoid coming out on the wrong end of a court ruling involving employment law and wrongful termination is to be able to prove that its policies and procedures were applied accurately, fairly and uniformly. A business is now finding that out the hard way after a federal appeals court ruled that the company failed to communicate how it was calculating an employee's benefits under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), and thus unjustly fired him.

The heart of the matter pertains to how FMLA benefits may be calculated under the appeals court's ruling. One method is based on the fact that employees are eligible for 12 weeks of FMLA leave each calendar year. The other is to calculate an employee's leave backward from the date the employee uses the leave.

An employee in Union County, New Jersey, claims that a political vendetta against his brother, a local politician, led to the employee being transferred to a windowless storage room at the county juvenile detention center to perform an undefined job that had no duties. The twist is that despite the employee's stated unhappiness, he was still drawing his previous salary of $122,000 to do it.

The employee, the former head of Union County's facilities and operations department, has been with the county since 1979, starting as a carpenter. He claims that when a political ally of the brothers left his state Senate seat in 2003, the employee's supervisor began to harass him. After the former senator died in 2005, the employee says the harassment increased, leading to the current employment litigation drama.

New Jersey employees have a right to be defended against wrongful termination from their jobs. One of the most powerful tools they have at their disposal is the whistleblower protection law. When employees suspect that employers are conducting their businesses in an illegal or unethical manner, they have a right to address those issues. They should not have to fear being fired for speaking up.

One such case is making its way through the legal system now as three former employees of Public Service Electric & Gas claim in their lawsuit in Essex County Superior Court that they were wrongfully terminated for reporting what they believe was fraud the company committed against ratepayers. In the suit, the three claim that PSE&G wrongfully used state solar money for a billboard, redirected efficiency money to cover a mistaken $325,000 payment to the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and ignored unbilled use of electricity by Newark's red light cameras--thus causing other customers to pay for it. PSE&G denies the allegations and says the employees were fired for legitimate reasons.