Employment

The Treasury Department and the IRS last week issued long-awaited final rules implementing the Affordable Care Act’s employer shared responsibility (a/k/a “pay-or-play”) rules. Originally slated to take effect beginning January 1, 2014, enforcement was delayed a full year by IRS Notice 2013-45.

On this Valentine’s Day I thought it would be a good idea to share an article that my partner Jen Rubin wrote a couple of years back.  It remains required reading to this day for employers trying to effectively manage their employees’ workplace romances.

Anti-poaching agreements, non-recruitment pacts, no-hire contracts, whatever you want to call them, require a protectable interest to be enforceable in New York. That’s what a Southern District of New York judge in Reed Elsevier Inc. v. TransUnion Holding Company, Inc. held.

A January 18th New York Times article (Rules for Equal Coverage by Employers Remain Elusive Under Health Law) reported on the progress, or lack thereof, of the adoption of group health plan non-discrimination regulations under the Affordable Care Act’s insurance market reforms.

Breaking with long standing tradition—i.e., issuing important rules on a Friday before a holiday weekend, or (failing that) any Friday (hence the reference to Week 45½ in this post)—the Treasury Department and the IRS today issued a 227-page final regulation under the Affordable Care Act’s employer shared responsibility (a/k/a “pay-or-play”) rules.

Last week the Colorado Supreme Court decided to review a 2013 appellate court decision holding that Colorado employers may lawfully terminate employees for their off-duty use of medical marijuana even if they are not impaired on the job.

Members of the Northwestern University football team have signed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board seeking recognition as a collective bargaining unit.

Another important ACA-related alert from Alden J. Bianchi: this time regarding the important changes related to the regulation of “excepted benefits.”

The W-2 reporting rules have been in effect for a while, and I do not address them in this post. This post instead addresses Code §§ 6055 and 6056, which were originally slated to take effect in 2014, but which were subsequently delayed by one year in IRS Notice 2013-45.

Our tax law colleague, Jonathan Talansky, discusses a recent tax court decision discussing that dreaded concept of “substantial risk of forfeiture” under section 83 of the Internal Revenue Code.

That's what one study by RiseSmart, a outplacement and recruiting firm, suggests. According to the study, the team hailing from the city with a lower unemployment rate prevailed in 20 of the last 25 Super Bowls.

This week the Supreme Court held that time unionized workers spend putting on (donning) and taking off (doffing) personal protective gear is not compensable under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The decision comes on the heels of a recent rise in donning and doffing collective action cases and will have a significant impact on employers with unionized employees.

Market disrupters always make news. Uber, which claims to be a tech company, created a smart-phone application that connects drivers of “black cars”, or livery cars, with passengers, and processes the payment with the passenger’s pre-registered credit card, all in exchange for 20% of the fare.

Today, as expected, the City Council formally introduced a bill to amend its existing paid sick leave law.  You can access the proposed amendments here.

We have a few open spots left, so we thought we'd pass along an invite for a wage and hour seminar we are hosting one week from today, Wednesday, January 29, 2014 at our New York office.  Program description below.  In person registration is from 7:30-8:00am and seminar will take place from 8:00-9:30am. We hope you can join us.

Final regulations implementing the Affordable Care Act’s rules governing shared responsibility of employers were widely expected to have “dropped” before the beginning, or perhaps during the first week, of 2014. These regulations implement arguably the most important of the Act’s provisions affecting (large) employers.

A recent decision from a Massachusetts appeals court should give some Massachusetts managers and directors one less thing to worry about.

On Saturday January 11, 2014, arbitrator Frank Horowitz reduced Alex Rodriguez’s suspension from 211 games to 162 games (plus any 2014 post-season games) for his use of performance enhancing drugs (“PEDs”) and obstruction of the MLB’s investigation into his use of PEDs.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and incoming Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito recently announced at a joint press conference that the New York City Council will look to expand the Earned Sick Time Act in the coming days. The Council enacted the paid leave law last year and it is currently scheduled to go into effect in April 2014.

New Jersey’s Appellate Division last week upheld a 2011 statute (N.J.S.A. 34:8B-1) that bars employers seeking to fill job vacancies in New Jersey from knowingly publishing advertisements stating that job applicants must be currently employed in order for their applications to be considered.