State and local legislatures have been active throughout 2024 passing laws and ordinances that will impact employers of all sizes and all industries.
Click HERE for our summary of these laws and related developments in Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, New York and elsewhere!
As always, our team will continue to monitor these and other state employment law developments. If you have questions or need guidance, please contact your SPB lawyer. Happy New Year!
Here’s a sentence you don’t see very often, but hats off to the Regulatory Policy Committee for its excoriating review last week of the thinking behind the new Employment Rights Bill.
The RPC is a body set up by the Labour government in 2009 as part of its Better Regulation Framework to ensure that the potential impacts of UK legislation are properly considered before it is enacted. Its report on the Employment Rights Bill is a masterclass in measured understatement, but the underlying message is very clear – large parts of the Bill are currently without demonstrated objective justification or consideration of their possible consequences for employers and the wider economy. To be clear, the RPC is not saying that those provisions are necessarily inappropriate, merely that there is somewhere between little and no evidence either that change is required in those respects or that the path taken by the Bill is the best of the available options if it is. The supporting impact assessments for eight out of 23 measures in the Bill and as a whole are expressly and repeatedly described by the RPC as rushed and “not fit for purpose”, with a number further described as either weak or very weak.
None of this will come as a surprise to anyone except Angela Rayner, since the subjugation of many of the measures in the Bill to political expediency and dogma has been obvious from the start. Anyone else whose baby had received such an immediate, comprehensive and laughably predictable shoeing would be in hiding by now, and so far the silence from the Department of Business and Trade on this has been noticeable.
As part of its drive to digitise the UK border and immigration system, with effect from today, the UK government has now opened the process for obtaining an electronic travel authorisation (ETA) for eligible non-European nationals who must hold an ETA if travelling to or through the UK from 8 January next year.
As many sponsors will know, the Home Office offers a priority change of circumstances service, allowing sponsors to request by email the prioritisation of certain Home Office sponsor-related actions (many of which are vital to their being able to progress a visa application). Without this service, the standard processing time for these requests of around 18 weeks would mean that some visa applications could be stopped in their tracks.
On 18 November 2024, the Spanish Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling with significant implications for labour and employment relations in Spain.
Previously, under the Workers’ Statute, employers were not required to hold a prior hearing for employees in disciplinary dismissal cases, unless the employee was unionized or a legal representative of the employees.
However, with this new ruling, effective from November 19, 2024, the Supreme Court has updated its position. Employers are now obliged to give employees the opportunity to respond to the allegations against them before proceeding with a disciplinary dismissal (a “prior hearing”). This decision is based on the need to directly apply Article 7 of Convention 158 of the International Labour Organization (ILO) of 1982, in force in Spain since 1986.
A failure to comply with this requirement may lead to disciplinary dismissals being declared unfair (“improcedente”) by the courts if challenged by the employee. This could result in the employer being ordered to pay potentially significant compensation to the dismissed employee (33 days of salary per year worked, with a maximum limit of 24 monthly payments).
We recommend that all employers operating in Spain review and update their internal dismissal procedures to ensure compliance with this new legal requirement.
Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Employers should expect changes to their immigration and hiring enforcement regimes under a second Trump administration. Based on campaign rhetoric and promises, those changes will include emboldened and focused immigration policies to remove millions of undocumented workers and tighten the legal immigration system. Below is a summary of expected employment-related immigration changes and practical steps U.S. employers can take to prepare for the next four years.
Employers fearing rising labor costs can rest a little easier now after a Texas federal court struck down the U.S. Department of Labor’s (“DOL”) final rule (the “2024 Rule”), which, in July 2024, increased the minimum salary employers are required to pay employees under the executive, administrative, and professional (“EAP”), or “white collar,” exemptions to avoid paying overtime wages otherwise required by the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”), and which would have required even higher salaries to be paid starting January 1, 2025.
The U.S. political landscape changed dramatically recently, in a way that will significantly impact labor law obligations for virtually all employers in the U.S. Republicans will control the White House and Congress come January, and Republican appointees will control the Supreme Court. By late January, Republican appointees will hold some of the key positions at the National Labor Relations Board. How will this change labor law? Some consequences are almost certain, while others are more speculative.
Towards the end of last year, the EAT in De Bank Haycocks v ADP RPO UK Ltd caused a bit of a stir in employment law circles when it suggested that even in smaller-scale redundancy situations (i.e. where collective redundancy consultation obligations are not triggered), there should be “general workforce consultation”. Unhelpfully for employers, it did not then shed any light on what this might look like, how long it should last, who it should involve, etc.
ADP decided to reduce a recruitment team from 16 to 14 following a reduction in demand for its services in light of the pandemic. Behind the scenes, the team’s manager conducted a scoring exercise. Two employees were identified as potentially redundant, Mr De Bank Haycocks (DBH) and one other employee who went voluntarily.
DBH was invited to a meeting at which he was advised of the need for redundancies, that a selection matrix scoring process would be used to determine who was selected for redundancy (even though this had in fact already taken place) and that he could ask questions and suggest alternative approaches to the proposed reduction. The company held two further meetings with DBH before he was dismissed. At no point pre-dismissal was he told his scores from the selection exercise, although he was provided with them before the appeal meeting. DBH brought an unfair dismissal claim alleging, among other things, that there had been a failure to consult properly.
Last week, the Democrat-majority members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB or Board) overruled a nearly 40-year old precedent (Tri-Cast), now making it unlawful for employers to explain to employees, even in non-coercive, non-threatening terms, the potential downside of selecting union representation (see our post here). With the election outcome poised to flip the Board to a Republican majority, and apparently looking to go out in a blaze of glory (or ignominy, depending on your perspective), the same NLRB members decided on November 13, 2024 to overrule nearly 80 years of precedent to hold that an employer violates Section 8(a)(1) of the National Labor Relations Act “when it compels employees to attend a captive-audience meeting on pain of discipline or discharge.”
