California continues to expand on its already extensive laws touching every aspect of the workplace. The state has been a pioneer in the development of worker protections against discrimination, harassment and retaliation. With its full-time legislature creating new rules every year, California is also a national leader in regulating wages, overtime, rest and leave time, privacy rights, and numerous other aspects of working life.
Management ignorance of such standards is of course no excuse for not complying with them. “Knowledge is power” and “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” may be clichés but they are also true. Regular and continuing employer education in workplace legal basics is not only essential to bare business survival but also to its expansion.
As an advocate for maintaining and, if necessary, restoring workplace harmony and efficiency, Mr. Bowles seeks to empower businesses through education of management and rank-and-file workers alike on their legal rights and responsibilities. Sometimes that education is necessary in the course of dealing with an actual or threatened claim. He also is an experienced teacher on employment basics, through public or privately arranged, custom-designed seminars for groups of any size.
Mr. Bowles is among the most reputed and respected lawyers in California, earning the highest possible “AV Preeminent” industry rating from his peers based on legal knowledge, experience, and judgment. He also carries Avvo’s highest possible rating of “Superb” for his experience and professional achievements, and he can be called the most knowledgeable management side employment lawyer Pasadena has to offer. Numerous clients from his 40-plus years of practice highly regard Mr. Bowles not only for his demonstrable skills but for a certain healthy combination of humor and skepticism he brings to the job. While litigation is never painless, many business owners and managers have commented that working with Mr. Bowles is at least several steps above dental work without Novocain.
The Twentieth Century, and the start of the Twenty-First, have been no cakewalk. While our advances in science and technology have made possible the real prospect of a civilized world community, the reason, ethics and justice that would establish a secure society and lasting peace have been repeatedly crushed by the madness of ignorance, global war and genocide. In the past one hundred years, more people died in the cause of freedom – and at the hands of technological “advancement” – and more put to death for their religion than at any other period of recorded history.
While some say that the past century delivered lessons that have enabled a more stable and interdependent world, we need not look very far for signs to the contrary – decaying, ineffective educational systems, growing pharmaceutical dependence for emotional “stability,” and destruction of human rights and civil liberties to “fight” faceless terrorism. Unless effective and enlightened leadership prevails, these trends herald this emerging Twenty-First Century as more anguished and inhumane than the one that has just passed.
I am a lawyer – and foster and expand this firm – because human survival depends on a social framework that promotes and supports the basic rights and nature of humanity to create and change conditions for the better. We are dedicated to serving in the employment realm as our societies are engaged upon it the vast majority of time. The workplace is thus a critical setting for productive, fair and mutually beneficial human interchange.
The justice system works only when individual citizens adhere to and are accountable to the ideal of personal responsibility – responsibility for one’s own condition, for family, for community and for the human race. Through our work as trusted advisors and litigators, our law firm is committed to helping those we touch to achieve that noble and worthwhile end.
Tim Bowles
January, 2021