In case you missed it, we had a number of interesting items to discuss this past week (and a few new things to pass along, discussed below):

  • Ryan Sobel discussed two new decisions out of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, each involving some unusual facts: the first reversing a lower court’s decision ordering a university to award a diploma to a student that engaged in a variety of unprofessional conduct, and the second where an employer terminated an employee who refused to provide his social security number for religious reasons.
  • Jill Kirila examined the lessons to be learned from the allegations in a recent lawsuit filed against Target involving responding to possible employee misconduct.
  • Lew Clark discussed several proposed amendments to employment laws that would impact employers in Arizona.
  • Sarah Joomun alerted employers in France to new statutory training provisions.
  • From our sister Global Compensation Insights blog, Greg Viviani highlighted the US Supreme Court’s apparent rejection of the Yard-Man presumption in retiree benefits cases.
  • Phillippa Canavan discussed the first decision interpreting the 2010 Agency Worker Regulations in the UK, providing a harsh lesson to the employer in that case.

Some new items of interest to share:

  • On Wednesday, Senate Republicans introduced the NLRB Reform Act.  According to the sponsors, the proposed law would balance the National Labor Relations Board to return it to its intended role as a neutral umpire instead of its current perception as a partisan advocate.  Among other things, the law would add a sixth member to the Board, require that the Board be comprised of an equal number of Republicans and Democrats, and that any Board decision have a four member majority.
  • Those new overtime exemption regulations the President directed – last March – that the Department of Labor issue, and which the DOL said would come out first in November 14, and then in February 2015?  Although we still have yet to see a draft of the new regulations, which have to go through a notice and comment period that is sure to be lengthy, several reports last week signal that the DOL is leaning towards raising the salary basis component of the exemption to in the neighborhood of $50,000 per year.  More to come on this when we see the proposed regulations.