You want a safe workplace and have adopted a Drug Free Workplace policy. You may even have government contracts that require you to drug test your employees. How does the brave new world of legalized marijuana, medical marijuana, and CBD products fit in? The answer, like many legal questions, depends. However, in Flannery v. Peco
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 (WHD) the authority to seek the payment of unpaid minimum wages or unpaid overtime. In the past, at the
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 further complicated by a question of whether unpaid participation in a program can make you
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 guidance, this time focusing on harassment in the construction industry.
There is nothing particularly
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 employee’s desire to take off due to a qualifying condition is another matter. But if you follow the procedures and
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 different theories of liability, but the court also provided a good refresher on “sex-plus” discrimination, or discrimination based
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 Final Rule on how employers pay wages for workers that receive tips. The court’s initial
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 a request to enjoin the rule. This essentially causes a split among two federal
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 about that. In every state but Louisiana and Mississippi, those regulations went into full effect on June 18
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 between the ages of 35 and 44, mental illness diagnoses have increased from 48% in 2019 to