On August 30, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) published a proposed new rule aimed at addressing the adverse effects of heat in the workplace. The proposed rule - titled Heat Injury and Illness Prevention in Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings - is intended to create a national workplace standard addressing prevention of heat-related illness, injury and death.
The proposed rule, should it be finalized, would apply to both indoor and outdoor work in general industry, construction, agriculture and maritime workplaces. There are a number of exceptions to the ...
The United States Supreme Court recently settled a circuit split concerning when an involuntary lateral transfer may violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Court’s opinion in Muldrow v. City of St. Louis Missouri, 601 U.S. – (2024) offers lessons for employers nationwide.
Case Facts: Plaintiff Muldrow worked as a plainclothes officer in the St. Louis Police Department’s Intelligence Division, investigating public corruption and human trafficking cases, overseeing the Gang Unit and serving as head of the Gun Crimes Unit. The position afforded her the status ...
On Labor Day fifty years ago, September 2, 1974, President Ford signed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) into law. It is a combination of tax and labor law incorporating trust law like fiduciary standards with respect to pensions and health benefits.
Brought about after pension defaults from companies like Studebaker, ERISA has been steadily and consistently amended to accommodate new benefit structures and realities. The acronyms of these updates may be familiar to many: COBRA, HIPAA, ACA, and SECURE.[1] These are complimented by alphabet soup of ...
The landscape of federal military leave law may be shifting. In the past three years, four federal appellate courts have held that an employer may be required to offer paid leave for an employee’s military service where the leave is comparable to paid leave offered by the employer for non-military reasons. Employers in these jurisdictions and other jurisdictions should consider reviewing their leave and paid leave policies with legal counsel to assess their potential obligations.
The federal Uniformed Services Employee and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) provides, in ...
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) recently extracted a multi-million dollar settlement from the Social Security Administration (SSA) for claims of pay disparities based on race. This signals a more aggressive approach to pay equity analysis and claims by the EEOC and other federal enforcement agencies - including the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) which is the US Department of Labor arm charged with the enforcement of affirmative action compliance by federal contractors and their applicable subcontractors. In the EEOC settlement ...
On May 24, 2024, Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz signed legislation amending the Minnesota Earned Sick and Safe Time (ESST) law that went into effect earlier this year on January 1, 2024. As a recap, the ESST law requires that employers provide each employee who works at least 80 hours per year in Minnesota at least one hour of paid sick and safe time for every 30 hours worked, up to at least 48 hours of accrued ESST a year. The law permits accrual or frontloading methods for providing ESST, with different roll-over requirements of unused time depending on the method used.
While there are ...
Colorado recently amended its CROWN Act of 2020 to include hair length as a protected characteristic for purposes of the state’s nondiscrimination law.
By way of background, in 2017, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled against the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission when it held that the defendant “…banning dreadlocks in the workplace under a race-neutral grooming policy—without more—does not constitute intentional race-based discrimination.” EEOC v. Catastrophe Management Solutions, 876 F.3d 1273 (11th Cir. 2017). Seeing a ...
On April 23, 2024, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) announced the issuance of a final Noncompete Clause Rule that would, if it goes into effect, ban future employment noncompete agreements and render most existing noncompete agreements void and unenforceable throughout the country. Our firm previously issued a number of alerts discussing the Noncompete Clause Rule.
When the Noncompete Clause Rule was announced, the rule was set to be effective 120 days after its publication in the Federal Register. On May 7, 2024, the rule was published in the Federal Register, which ...
At the end of April 2024, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) published its final guidance on harassment in the workplace, “Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace” (“Guidance”). The Guidance is lengthy, with 387 footnotes, and it contains 77 examples and scenarios of various types of unlawful harassment according to the EEOC. The EEOC’s examples include harassing conduct based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions; sexual orientation; and gender identity), national ...
How should an employer react if an employee claims that mandatory anti-discrimination training conflicts with the employee’s religious beliefs? Two recent EEOC decisions shed some light on this question. In both cases, the employer provided mandatory training on treating co-workers and customers with dignity and respect to prevent discrimination and harassment. In one case, an employee sought to be excused from any portion of the training which discussed LGBTQI+ issues because he asserted that this conflicted with his sincerely held Catholic religious beliefs. In the other ...
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