Seyfarth Synopsis: With the 2025 New York legislative session now completed, several bills that passed both the Senate and Assembly may be headed to the Governor for signature, but two significant bills that passed the Senate did not pass the Assembly and will not become law.
The 2025 New York legislative session has come to an end with some expected and unexpected legislative outcomes. Outlined below are the employment-related bills that passed both chambers of the Legislature and now await the Governor’s signature, and some that surprisingly failed to pass the Assembly.
Any discussion of the session’s employment-focused legislation must begin with the amendments to the New York Labor Law, enacted in May as part of the State budget. Those amendments effectively end the near-decade-long run of class actions for failure to pay manual workers on a weekly basis. As discussed here and here, the amendments preclude liquidated damages against first-time offenders of the weekly-pay requirement and limit damages to small amounts of interest. Weekly payment for manual workers remains the law, but the windfall for plaintiffs and their attorneys is no more.
In other developments from the 2025 session, three bills passed both chambers of the Legislature:
- S7388: Otherwise known as the Remedial Construction of the New York Labor Law Act, this bill provides that the Labor Law must be construed liberally in favor of workers. The bill specifically directs courts interpreting the law “to ensure all future interpretations of the labor law comport with its broad remedial purposes,” to include, “with respect to exceptions and exemptions to the labor law’s requirements of employers, construing all such exceptions and exemptions narrowly in order to maximize deterrence of unlawful conduct.”
- S8338: This bill is designed to counteract an executive order by the Trump administration that the Legislature perceived as undermining the viability of disparate impact claims. Accordingly, the bill “would codify disparate impact analysis for employment discrimination cases in New York State law, ensuring plaintiffs can continue to bring disparate impact cases under New York law, despite the shifting federal landscape.” More specifically, the legislation provides that “an unlawful discriminatory practice may be established by a practice’s discriminatory effect, even if such practice was not motivated by discriminatory intent,” though the challenged practice may be justified when: (1) it is “job related” and “consistent with business necessity” and (2) “the business necessity could not be served by another practice that has a less discriminatory effect.”
- S8034A: This bill amends the New York Labor Law to ensure that employees who otherwise would receive protections under the National Labor Relations Act continue to receive such protections even when the National Labor Relations Board is without a quorum. More information on this law – and likely legal challenges should the Governor sign it – can be found here.
All three bills must be signed by Governor Hochul in order to become law. Under the somewhat arcane legislative process in New York, the Governor’s time to sign or veto a bill does not begin until the bill is formally “delivered” to her office. In the interim, the Governor and Legislature often negotiate over a bill’s terms behind the scenes.
Also of note are two bills that passed the Senate but not the Assembly during this legislative session: (1) a bill banning non-compete agreements and (2) the No Severance Ultimatum Act (“NSUA”).
As discussed here, the bill seeking to prohibit non-compete agreements would have broadly banned non-competes, with limited exceptions related to legitimate business interests, sale of a business, highly compensated individuals, and broadcast employees. A similar bill passed both chambers of the Legislature by wide margins in 2023 but was vetoed by the Governor.
And as discussed here, the NSUA would have applied many of the familiar requirements of the federal Older Workers Benefit Protection Act to releases of claims in any agreement between an employer and an employee for severance pay, specifically, that the separating employee would have at least 21 business days to review severance agreements before signing and seven days thereafter to revoke the agreement.
