Employment

The California Fair Pay Act, which goes into effect on January 1, 2016, prohibits employers from paying employees less than the rate paid to members of the opposite sex who perform “substantially similar” work.

If you have been following my corporate divorce series, you may have read the “Break Up” piece where I advised newly terminated folks to keep their cool if they are unexpectedly fired because their post-firing behavior might impact a severance offer.

A U.S. Department of Labor final regulation prohibiting third-party home care agencies and other third-party employers from taking advantage of the Companionship and Live-In Domestic Worker minimum wage and overtime exemptions is set to go into effect on October 13, 2015.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) has now declared Safe Harbor invalid – in total.

My colleague, Tyrone Thomas was quoted in the Law360 article, Attorneys React to NCAA Student-Athlete Pay Ruling, in which he analyzes the Ninth Circuit Court’s decision to strike down the NCAA’s ban on paying student-athletes and outlines the positive implications of the decision for the NCAA.

On September 29, the House subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions held a legislative hearing to consider the Protecting Local Business Opportunity Act, H.R. 3459.

This series is devoted principally to the reporting requirements imposed by Internal Revenue Code §§ 6055 and 6056 as added by §§ 1502 and 1514 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), respectively. The former reports offers of minimum essential coverage, which allows taxpayers to demonstrate that they have complied with the law’s individual mandate.

Despite previous NLRB rulings telling them to stop, some employers continue to impose broad prohibitions on personal employee communications over company email.

The Eleventh Circuit recently joined the Second Circuit in adopting the employer-friendly “primary beneficiary” test to determine whether unpaid interns are properly classified as employees under the FLSA.

I recently read in the NY Times that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission settled a charge with Time Warner, Inc., the parent company of CNN and Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. where a former employee alleged that Time Warner’s parental leave policy discriminated against him as a biological father.

While the Dodd-Frank Act provides various protections to whistleblowers, federal courts have inconsistently interpreted who precisely qualifies as a whistleblower.

In Notice 2014-69,  the Treasury Department and the IRS clarified that a group health plan that fails to provide substantial coverage for in-patient hospitalization and physician services will not be treated as providing minimum value, despite that the plan might otherwise return a value of 60% from the Department of Health and Human Service’s (HHS)

The so-called “manager rule” addresses a concern that employers may face a “litigation minefield” if a manager whose very job duties required them to report discrimination complaints could later sue for retaliation if they were adversely affected by the making of that report.

In a sign of the growing trend of states enacting statutes protecting employee privacy, Maine became the latest state to prohibit employers from requiring employees and job applicants to provide passwords to their personal Facebook and other social media accounts.  Since 2012, nearly half of the states have passed such laws.

The IRS recently issued final instructions for Forms 1094-B and 1095-B and Forms 1094-C and 1095-C . The 2015 Instructions for Forms 1094-B and 1095-B implement a suggestion we made in a previous post relating to the reporting of Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs) that are integrated with other group health plan coverage.

Earlier this month, the New Jersey Appellate Division ruled that employee arbitration agreements, to be enforceable, must contain a “clear and unmistakable” waiver of an employee’s right to a trial in court.

My colleague, Heidi Lawson recently wrote a post on Securities Matters that analyzed the implications of the Justice department’s newest initiative to prosecute executives for white collar crimes through evidence turned over by their companies.

The Affordable Care Act’s reporting rules—which are set out in Internal Revenue Code §§ 6055 and 6056—solicit the information needed by the Internal Revenue Service to enforce the individual and employer shared responsibility rules and to support the proper administration of premium tax subsidies.

Last week, the Stop Credit Discrimination in Employment Act became effective. It amended the New York City Human Rights Law to prohibit most employers from making employment decisions based on an employee or applicant’s consumer credit history. You can read the specifics here.

With an estimated 148,000 petitions rejected from this year’s H-1B cap lottery, employers are struggling to come up with creative options to secure the talent they need to conduct business in the US. The Mintz Levin immigration team has outlined a number of different legally viable options for employers to explore in order to ensure their personnel needs are met.