A year after announcing its first-in-the-nation effort to increase access to pregnancy-related healthcare, New York’s “paid prenatal leave” law is officially set to take effect on January 1, 2025.  Employers will be required to begin offering New York employees 20 hours of paid leave during a 52-week period to attend to prenatal medical needs, which is in addition to existing sick/safe leave already required in New York.  The New York State Department of Labor recently released an FAQ document to assist employers in implementing this new leave.  We detail some of the most pertinent guidance below.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently granted cert in a hotly contested case addressing the standards of proof applicable to reverse discrimination claims under Title VII.  The case comes on the heels of the court’s decision last term in Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, Mo., where it lowered the standard to prove that an employee suffered an adverse employment action (now, employees need only show that they suffered “some harm respecting an identifiable term or condition of employment”).  In the next term, in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, SCOTUS will turn its attention to so-called “reverse” discrimination and whether members of a majority group will be required to meet a heightened pleading standard to prove their claims.

New York’s Clean Slate Act is now effective.  The Act will lead to the automatic sealing of certain criminal records and will require greater disclosure by employers of the criminal history they can consider in connection with hiring or other employment decisions. 

Political conflicts in the workplace will only grow as we near election day, and this means human resources professionals and in house counsel need to hone their conflict resolution skills.  Resolving political conflict in the workplace is a bit more nuanced than resolving ordinary workplace slights, requiring legally compliant de-escalation. We thought a few guidelines – tested against some real-life scenarios – would be a useful campaign stop for those charged with managing these issues.  Here’s a teaser: you learn a company supervisor has just invited the supervisor’s entire team to a weekend rally for [insert any candidate’s name here].  What if anything do you do that doesn’t place you (and the company) squarely within the bullseye of our sharply divided political environment?  

A judge in the Northern District of Texas issued an order setting aside the Federal Trade Commission’s rule banning non-compete agreements and ordered that the rule shall not be enforced or otherwise take effect on September 4, 2024.  This much-awaited decision comes after the judge already issued a limited preliminary injunction in the same case in early July as to the named plaintiffs there (discussed here).  Although multiple other courts have recently weighed in on the issue to mixed results, including federal courts in Pennsylvania and Florida (see here), the Texas judge’s ruling has resulted in the first nationwide prohibition on the FTC’s enforcement of the rule.  Accordingly, barring any intervening appellate activity, the FTC’s rule will no longer go into effect on September 4, 2024 (the original effective date), employers will not be required to void employees’ existing non-competes covered by the rule, and employers are no longer required to send employees notices regarding the status of any non-competes. 

On August 14th, a second federal judge, this time out of the Middle District of Florida, temporarily blocked the FTC’s rule banning non-compete agreements, but only as to the named plaintiff in that case.