The call or visit that no employer wants to receive: a Department of Labor representative asking to look at your payroll records. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) gives the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division...more
7/3/2025
/ Department of Labor (DOL) ,
Employer Liability Issues ,
Employer Responsibilities ,
Employment Litigation ,
Enforcement Actions ,
Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) ,
Liquidated Damages ,
Minimum Wage ,
New Guidance ,
Over-Time ,
Settlement ,
Wage and Hour
In Title VII actions, plaintiffs have a limited amount of time to file a charge of discrimination (or a court can dismiss the case as untimely). In the case of Wells v. Texas Tech University, the timeliness dynamic was...more
3/11/2025
/ Adverse Employment Action ,
Discrimination ,
Employee Rights ,
Employees ,
Employer Liability Issues ,
Employment Litigation ,
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) ,
Gender Discrimination ,
Retaliation ,
Sexual Harassment ,
Title VII
Harassment prevention is still a top priority for federal agencies (which means it should be a priority for all employers). Last spring, we blogged about the EEOC’s guidance on this issue, and now the OFCCP has issued its own...more
Most employers have gotten the hang of handling FMLA requests: Make sure the employee is eligible; get paperwork from the provider; and monitor the amount of time taken. Whether all supervisors are overjoyed with every...more
Here’s a refresher: Discriminating against a subclass of a sex (e.g., older women or black women) is still discrimination. In McCreight v. AuburnBank, the Eleventh Circuit clarified a few things for the lawyers related to the...more
9/26/2024
/ Age Discrimination ,
Civil Rights Act ,
Corporate Counsel ,
Employer Liability Issues ,
Employment Litigation ,
Employment Policies ,
Enforcement Actions ,
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) ,
Hostile Environment ,
Retaliation ,
Sexual Harassment ,
Title VII
How the FLSA “tip credit” is applied has been pushed and pulled numerous times over the last two decades. In the latest volley, the Fifth Circuit entered an order on August 23, 2024, vacating the Department of Labor’s 2021...more
8/29/2024
/ Department of Labor (DOL) ,
Employer Liability Issues ,
Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) ,
Final Rules ,
Labor Reform ,
Labor Regulations ,
Legislative Agendas ,
Minimum Wage ,
Rate of Pay ,
Regulatory Agenda ,
Regulatory Requirements ,
State and Local Government ,
Tax Credits ,
Tipped Employees ,
Tips ,
Wage and Hour
By now, we all know that the FTC proposed a rule that will ban nearly every noncompete agreement and that a number of companies have filed legal challenges to it. This week, a federal judge in Pennsylvania weighed in, denying...more
With the passage of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA), the law on how you accommodate pregnant workers changed last June, and we blogged about it. Then the EEOC issued extensive regulations last August, and we blogged...more
6/21/2024
/ Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) ,
Employee Rights ,
Employees ,
Employer Liability Issues ,
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) ,
Federal Labor Laws ,
Labor Reform ,
Pregnancy ,
Pregnancy Discrimination ,
Pregnant Workers Fairness Act ,
Reasonable Accommodation ,
Regulatory Agenda
Does it seem like you are dealing with more mental health issues in your workforce? If so, you are not alone. Recent mental health claim statistics show an alarming increase in chronic illnesses since the pandemic. For adults...more
On April 23, 2024, the Federal Trade Commission issued a broad Final Rule that effectively bans noncompete clauses nationwide. The FTC states that noncompete clauses are an unfair method of competition and violate Section 5...more
It is every employer’s nightmare: You find out that employees (or former employees) are claiming that they were not paid properly and are due overtime for the last two or three years. This primarily arises because you...more
You may recall that in 2021 the State of Florida, in a much-publicized move, passed a law called the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” which banned Florida employers from mandating employee attendance to any training or instruction that...more
3/8/2024
/ Class Action ,
Discrimination ,
Diversity and Inclusion Standards (D&I) ,
Employee Training ,
Employer Liability Issues ,
Employer Mandates ,
First Amendment ,
Florida ,
Race Discrimination ,
Stop Woke Act ,
Title VII ,
Unconstitutional Condition
If an individual’s disability causes involuntary racist or profane utterances, what would a reasonable accommodation under the ADA look like? In Cooper v. Dolgencorp, LLC, the Sixth Circuit faced just such an inquiry....more
Changes in supervision may result in fresh ways of doing things. Certain rules that were never fully enforced may now come to the forefront. Can a new supervisor’s radical change in a long-term employee’s performance rating...more
As this blog has consistently noted in the past, one of the most effective ways to combat unfounded allegations in the workplace is diligent record-keeping. Many employers have “point-based” disciplinary policies in which...more
1/9/2024
/ Absenteeism ,
Discrimination ,
Documentation ,
Employer Liability Issues ,
Employment Litigation ,
Employment Policies ,
Notice Requirements ,
Race Discrimination ,
Racial Bias ,
Reporting Requirements ,
Termination
Today, the NLRB issued their Final Rule on what constitutes joint-employer status under the National Labor Relations Act. This new rule overrides the old 2020 standard, that was much stricter in what type of control had to...more
For more than 50 years, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has required certain employers to submit annual EEO-1s with workforce demographic data (i.e., number of employees by job category and by sex and race or...more
The DOL issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking proposing, among other things, to increase the salary threshold for white-collar overtime exemptions. You may recall that there was a lot of discussion about this back in 2016...more
9/7/2023
/ Department of Labor (DOL) ,
Employer Liability Issues ,
Employment Litigation ,
Employment Policies ,
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) ,
Exempt-Employees ,
Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) ,
Highly Compensated Employees ,
Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR) ,
Over-Time ,
Proposed Rules ,
White-Collar Exemptions
If you are an employer covered by the federal Fifth Circuit (Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi), you are probably familiar with the “ultimate employment decision” standard: In determining whether an employee suffered an...more
No-fault attendance policies may be on a watchlist for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
A recent matter before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, EEOC v. Eberspaecher North America Inc.,...more
Many workplaces allow their employees to listen to music or radio on site. But what if employees choose to blast “sexually graphic” and “violently misogynistic” songs throughout a warehouse? Does it matter whether the...more
Tracking intermittent FMLA time — it’s every HR professional’s favorite thing to do. Do you come up with a total number of hours per employee or just count portions of the workweek? What do you do if an employee takes...more
Do you have a “no fault” attendance policy or some other way in which employees get points for absences? If so, be careful. A recent Eleventh Circuit matter, EEOC v. Eberspaecher North America, Inc. suggests that the Equal...more
Can you require your workers to arbitrate claims? What if they work in interstate commerce? Recently several courts have addressed the scope of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) and when it applies to arbitration agreements...more
Mass shootings have been increasingly in the headlines in recent years, and many of these incidents have occurred in the workplace. Regardless of anyone’s politics, employers are having to face either the fear of, or the...more
4/13/2023
/ Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) ,
Employee Training ,
Employees ,
Employer Liability Issues ,
Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) ,
Hostile Environment ,
Mass Shootings ,
Risk Management ,
Workplace Communication ,
Workplace Safety ,
Workplace Violence