Minimum Wage Updates
On March 28, 2019, Maryland’s legislators voted to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15.00 per hour by January 1, 2025 for employers with 15 or more employees and July 1, 2026 for employers with 14 or fewer employees. Continue Reading
Beginning January 1, 2019, employees became entitled to a new benefit which must be provided by employers under Article 185.1 of the Russian Labour Code.
On April 11th, USCIS announced that its computer-generated random selection process was completed. USCIS drew the numbers of the lucky H-1B petitions that made the cut under the congressionally-mandated regular cap of 65,000 visa numbers and the U.S. advanced degree exemption of 20,000 visa numbers for fiscal year (FY) 2020. Continue Reading
If you have recently read the headline, say, “Directors personally liable for company’s breach of employment contract” and now quail in anticipation of a whole new avenue of attack on your business, fear not. All is not as it seems.
According to the most recent data from the Center for Disease Control, more than one-third of American adults are obese. A person is considered obese when their weight is higher than what is considered as a healthy weight for a given height. With obesity impacting such a large portion of the American public, employers are left with many questions regarding their responsibilities to obese applicants and employees. The answers to these questions depend on a number of factors, including the reasons underlying the obesity and the jurisdiction in which the employer does business.
As we all know, the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) prohibits employers from discriminating against “qualified individuals” with disabilities, and defines such individuals as applicants or employees who, with or without reasonable accommodation, can perform the essential functions of the job. In 2008, Congress amended the ADA, providing for a broader interpretation of the definition of disability under the statute. Further, the amendment added a “regarded as” disabled component of disability discrimination, meaning that applicants and employees who cannot prove that they have an actual disability within the meaning of the ADA may still be successful if they can show that their employer regarded them as having such a disability. This more expansive interpretation of disability provides obese plaintiffs a greater opportunity for success in disability discrimination claims; however, jurisdictions differ on the extent to which obesity is considered a disability under the ADA, as amended. Continue Reading
When organizations are seeking to expand their operations, they often will find interesting targets who have union-represented employees. A union’s presence will create additional compliance obligations but contrary to common misconceptions, union-related obligations are not necessarily unmanageable. Continue Reading
Come April 2020, if you want to avoid having to deduct tax on invoices from J Soap & Co for the supply of Joe Soap, you will need to confident that it is in business on its own account and not just a vehicle for our Joe to minimise his income tax bill. Key to being in business on one’s own account, successfully at least, is having a range of customers, so your contract needs to avoid terms which force J Soap & Co to cut across that requirement. This may take a variety of forms:
In America’s heartland and one of the states hit hardest by the current opioid epidemic, Ohio’s workers’ compensation system will soon drop Oxycontin as a covered prescription.
Effective June 1, 2019, the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation (BWC) will no longer pay for the most commonly abused opioid painkiller, Oxycontin. This change will affect those covered by the BWC, which is one of the few state monopolistic workers’ compensation systems and the largest state-run insurance system in the US. Continue Reading
As we previously reported here, on March 4, 2019, a federal court issued an order lifting the stay implemented by the White House Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”) regarding the pay data collection component of the EEO-1 report, finding that the OMB failed to demonstrate good cause for the stay. The order left many open questions concerning how and when employers would be required to respond with pay data in their EEO-1 filings. At a March 19 status conference, the court requested that the government come up with a plan to comply with its order.
In response, OMB informed the court in a brief filed on April 3, 2019 that the EEOC is able to undertake and complete collection of the required 2018 EEO-1 pay data forms by September 30, 2019. However, the proposed deadline is contingent upon the EEOC’s use of a third party data and analytics contractor, and the agency estimates that the collection by September 30 will “cost in excess of $3 million.” Further, the EEOC warns that “there is a serious risk that the expedited data collection process may yield poor quality data because of the limited quality control and quality assurance measures that would be implemented due to the expedited timeline.” Continue Reading
Expanding on their previous post on the subject, on April 3, 2019, Law360 published the following article authored by Squire Patton Boggs labor and employment attorneys Laura Lawless Robertson and Melissa Legault.
The U.S. Department of Labor recently issued a trio of opinion letters offering employers guidance in implementing the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act.
The letter with the broadest application to U.S. employers is FMLA2019-1-A which deals with the issue of whether an employer may delay the designation of FMLA-covered leave, and whether employers can expand FMLA leave beyond an employee’s 12-week (or in the case of military caregiver leave, 26-week) entitlement.
