Employment

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.

A group of female sales representatives alleging sex-based pay discrimination claims against their employer under the federal Equal Pay Act cleared an initial, but significant, hurdle last week when the Southern District of New York granted their motion for conditional certification of a collective action seeking more than $100 million in damages.

The Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) employer shared responsibility rules provide applicable large employers (i.e., those with 50 or more full-time and full-time equivalent employees on business days during the preceding calendar year) with a choice: make an offer of group health plan coverage to substantially all of the employer’s full-time employees or pay a non-deductible

Settlement appears imminent in an employee class action against Sony Pictures Entertainment (“SPE”) arising from disclosure of their personally identifiable information (“PII”) in a massive data breach allegedly perpetrated by North Korean hackers in retaliation for SPE’s release of “The Interview,” a satirical comedy depicting an attempt on the life of North Korean

Wasn't it just Memorial Day?  We cannot believe that summer is almost over.  We hope that you enjoy your long Labor Day weekend with friends and family, and we look forward to continuing to bring you the latest and greatest in employment law updates during the coming fall season.

If you tuned in to my appearance a few months ago on Bloomberg Law Radio, you heard me bemoaning our legal system’s failure to catch up with the gig economy.

One of the questions clients frequently pose to me is how to make employment policies uniform across the different states where their employees work.

My colleague, Don Schroeder was quoted in the SHRM article, “Northwestern Football Players’ Unionization Drive Halted” in which he analyzes the significance of the NLRB’s decision to decline to assert jurisdiction over the Northwestern Football Players’ unionization efforts.

When it comes to mergers and acquisitions involving at least one applicable large employer (ALE), the substantive rules governing employer shared responsibility (under Internal Revenue Code § 4980H) and the corresponding reporting rules (under Internal Revenue Code § 6056) share at least one thing in common: we don’t yet know how they work.

The NLRB dropped a major bomb on businesses in subcontracting, franchising, and temporary staffing relationships yesterday, adopting a new—very, very broad—definition of joint employment.

My colleague Wynter Deagle recently wrote a post on Privacy & Security Matters discussing some implications and lessons from the recent Ashley Madison hack and data dump. It's important to understand the increased risk for employers this data dump created.

Sorry, we couldn’t resist mixing our baseball metaphors.  In Bais Yaakov of Spring Valley v. ACT, Inc., the First Circuit affirmed a district court decision refusing to dismiss a putative class action as moot based on an unaccepted offer under FRCP 68 that defendant claimed would provide complete relief to the plaintiff.