Labor & Employment Law Update

If you weren’t playing Texas hold’em, would you ever raise the stakes?  Or, as an employer would you ever promise to do more than the law requires to comply with anti-discrimination law?  Costco Wholesale Warehouse provided language in its employee handbook that was found to provide more protection for employees than the law requires.

Peter Marini worked as a baker’s assistant at a Costco Warehouse in Connecticut.  He suffers from Tourette’s syndrome, which causes involuntary twitches and other unusual physical manifestations and verbal utterings.  Unfortunately, he was ...

On December 2, 2014, the Chicago City Council approved The Chicago Minimum Wage Ordinance (Chicago Municipal Code §1-24), increasing the minimum wage to $13.00 per hour.  Here are nine points you need to know now:

1. Covered employees are those who work for at least two hours in any two-week period within Chicago’s geographic boundaries, including driving through the city (e.g., that delivery driver that takes Route 94 from Evanston to Gary and gets stuck in rush hour traffic is covered!).  Time commuting between home and work does not count.
2. Employers with at least one ...

Every year at this time, employers ask us the same set of questions: Do we have to pay employees for holiday time off, or overtime if they work on a holiday? What about inclement weather closings?

Non-Exempt Employees

Non-exempt employees are those that are covered by the minimum wage and overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and its state counterparts.  These are the bulk of the workforce, and typically hourly workers.  Non-exempt employees generally (exceptions follow) only need to be paid for hours they actually work – and not for holidays or ...

Did you watch the President address the nation live last week? On November 20, 2014, President Obama announced a series of executive actions, including cracking down on illegal immigration at the border, prioritizing deportation of felons (details of which are still unclear), and requiring certain undocumented immigrants to pass a criminal background check and pay taxes in order to temporarily stay in the U.S. without fear of deportation.

The initiatives include:

– Deferred Action for Parents (DAP). Parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents (LPR’s of any ...

On November 6, Indiana’s right-to-work law cleared its most recent major hurdle. The Indiana Supreme Court upheld the law overturning a Lake County decision declaring the law unconstitutional. The Seventh Circuit upheld the law in September. Meanwhile the Michigan Supreme Court announced it will hear argument in January on whether its state’s right-to-work laws properly apply to state employees.

So, Indiana and Michigan and twenty-two other states (the entire south plus several states in the west) now have right-to-work laws on the books and several others have considered ...

I know, I know.  You may have seen the headlines indicating that the Supreme Court is going to be reviewing another case challenging the Affordable Care Act and not even bothered to read the articles this time.  After all, who hasn’t become a little tired of hearing about challenges and changes to the Affordable Care Act with constant updates occurring over the now almost five years since the act was signed into law by President Obama? Or perhaps it isn’t that you are tired of hearing about the ACA; you were just distracted when Kim Kardashian broke the internet.  In any event, the ...

As most employers are aware, the EEOC has been on a multi-year campaign aimed at ferreting out alleged systemic discrimination by using an individual charge of discrimination as a springboard to investigating company-wide practices.  The EEOC has been doing this by issuing broad requests for information, and then subpoenas, that seek company-wide information even though there is only an individual charge.  Employers often balk at producing this information articulating a lack of relevance to the individual charge.

By and large, the federal courts have enforced the EEOC ...

Six months ago, the NLRB held (on remand from the Ninth Circuit) that an employer violated the National Labor Relations Act by firing an employee even though he called his supervisor a “[multiple expletives deleted]“  and even threatened that if he was fired, the boss would “regret it.”  Plaza Auto Center, Inc., 360 NLRB No. 117 (2014).  That decision left many employers exasperated, and still does.  Recently however, the board issued a decision that confirms that even this pro-labor board recognizes that some employee conduct falls outside the protections of the National ...

On October 30, 2014 in the case of Overstreet v. Farm Fresh Co. Target One LLC, No. 2:13-cv-02358, the Arizona Federal District Court ordered attorney’s fees be paid to Farm Fresh Co. Target One LLC (Farm Fresh) by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) due to the NLRB’s demand that Farm Fresh reinstate four employees without following the federal and Arizona state laws governing the use of E-Verify.

In 2013, Farm Fresh was purchased through an asset purchase agreement by a new owner.  The new owner (after receiving advice and guidance from the Dept. of Homeland Security ...

Employers who have been using E-Verify for more than 10 years must be aware that as of January 1, 2015, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will be deleting any transaction records in the E-Verify system that are more than 10 years old.  As of January 1, 2015, employers will no longer have access in E-Verify to any case they created prior to December 31, 2004.  In order to have a record of the cases that are more than 10 years old, employers must download the new Historic Records Report before the December 31, 2014 deadline.  USCIS is encouraging all employers who were ...