Labor & Employment Law Update

Employers are receiving a temporary reprieve from the controversial “Cadillac Tax” on health plans as part of a large spending and tax bill signed into law by President Obama on Friday, December 18, 2015. The Consolidated Appropriations Act (the “Act”) delays the effective date of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA’s) excise tax on so-called high cost health plans, known as the “Cadillac Tax,” until January 1, 2020.

The Cadillac Tax, previously scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2018, is a 40% excise tax on employers and insurers who offer health insurance plans that ...

Have you noticed that an employee’s requests for leave tend to occur on a Friday or Monday?  Is an employee suddenly unable to work immediately before or after holidays? It is not unusual for employers to experience FMLA abuse, especially around the holidays. The following are a few practices that can help you combat FMLA abuse:

1. Be Vigilant and Be Aware – Having a system that tracks when employees take FMLA leave can help you identify patterns of abuse and act quickly to investigate and address them appropriately.

1. Control Scheduling – FMLA regulations require that absences for ...

A Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) collective action lawsuit, filed over five years ago by Chicago police officers who claimed they were not paid overtime for their off-duty use of work-issued BlackBerrys, went to a bench trial in August, and the federal judge recently ruled in the City’s favor.  Although the court, in Allen, et al. v. City of Chicago, Case No. 10-C-3183 (N.D. Ill. Dec. 10, 2015), found that the police officers were performing compensable overtime work on their devices while off-duty, the police officers failed to prove that there was an unwritten policy to deny them ...

Last month, in Porter v. Houma Terrebonne Housing Authority Board of Commissioners (“HTHA”), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that a former employee’s claim of unlawful retaliation based on complaints of sexual harassment should proceed to trial.

Such a ruling is not necessarily unusual, but what makes this one unique is  the court held that an employer’s refusal to let an employee rescind her resignation can be an “adverse employment action”—one of the three prima facie elements of a claim for unlawful retaliation under Title VII of the Civil ...

The current version of the Form I-9 is set to expire on 3/31/16. In advance of the expiration, USCIS has issued proposed changes to the Form I-9 for public comment. The new version would allow employers to complete the form on their computer with some imbedded prompts assisting them in the completion of the form. This is an attempt to reduce technical errors commonly made on the Form I-9. Employers would still be able to complete the form by hand if they choose to do so.

Some of the proposed changes included are:

• Electronic checks on certain fields to ensure accuracy
• Drop down lists for ...

On December 3, the Federal Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin) affirmed dismissal of a failure to accommodate claim brought by an employee bumped from a job assignment that accommodated his disability after his employer opened that assignment to seniority-based bidding pursuant to the terms of the collective bargaining agreement (CBA).

After a series of injuries and several extended leaves of absence, the employee was released to return to work with permanent restrictions that prevented him from performing many of the physically demanding ...

On December 1, 2015, in conjunction with World AIDS Day, the EEOC issued two new guidance documents addressing the legal rights available to employees with HIV/AIDS under the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”).

While these documents specifically reference HIV and AIDS, the reality is that this new guidance has tremendous value to human resources professionals and other management decision-makers who may be faced with accommodation requests based on virtually any medical condition. Moreover, although the guidance is not specifically directed to employers, again the ...

Medical marijuana (MMJ) is now permitted in 23 states and Washington D.C. Out of those 23 states four of them permit recreational use. Though it remains illegal on the Federal level, the U.S. Department of Justice recently announced the release of over 6,000 inmates convicted of nonviolent drug charges. This begs the question – are you prepared for medical cannabis in the workplace?

Nondiscrimination Policies

Most states with MMJ prohibit discrimination on the basis of a worker or applicant being a registered patient. However, employers should also carefully consider that a ...

In June 2014, the Supreme Court issued a decision impacting “fair share” provisions in public sector collective bargaining agreements. By a 5-4 vote, the justices ruled in Harris v. Quinn that home health care workers in Illinois could not be compelled to financially support a union they did not want to join. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito noted that the “primary purpose of permitting unions to collect fees is to ‘prevent nonmembers from free-riding on the unions’ efforts, sharing the employment benefits obtained by the union’s collective ...

A couple of months ago, we discussed the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) startling decision in Browning-Ferris Industries of California, Inc., 362 NLRB No. 186 (2015), in which it determined that a non-union company shared joint employer liability, under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), with a labor contractor at one of its recycling plants. The Board held that two or more entities are joint employers if each one possesses sufficient control over employee’s essential terms and conditions of employment. Employers were in an uproar over the decision ...