Employment

Can an employer escape a treble damage award under the Massachusetts Wage Act where it makes a late payment of final wages to a fired employee after the employee filed a wage complaint with the state Attorney General but before the employee filed a complaint with the court?  That is the question which a Massachusetts Superior Court recently answered in the affirmative.

Yes I realize that had my Corporate Divorce series progressed in a linear way, I would have started with The Courtship instead of The Break Up, but employment law metaphors are sometimes unpredictable. In my defense, I note that if you end up in divorce, you must have started with marriage, so there is a certain logic to this after all.

The New York Times reported yesterday that it received a draft executive order marked “pre-decisional and deliberative,” which contemplates granting a minimum of 56 hours of paid sick leave per year to employees of federal contractors and subcontractors.

We have frequently written about the increasing likelihood that courts will enforce arbitration agreements to resolve a broad range of issues arising out of the employment relationship.

We are pleased to report that Employment Matters was recently ranked as the No. 1 Employment Law Blog and the No. 10 overall Legal Blog in LexBlog’s AmLaw 200 Blog Benchmark Report, which you can read here.  These rankings are based on overall traffic so we absolutely could not have done this without our readers (that’s you!).

Alden Bianchi, Chair of Mintz Levin’s Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation Practice, will provide a weekly installment on the complex reporting obligations outlined by the Affordable Care Act for health insurance carriers and employers. In this 24-week series, Alden will explain key requirements as he counts down to the January 2016 ACA reporting deadlines.

The California paid sick leave law provided a significant boon to employees not included under employers’ sick leave or paid time off policies, but it often created more questions than answers for companies. How do we calculate one hour of paid sick leave for salaried employees?

If you're an employer and not following our Immigration Law blog, you should be. On it, one of my colleagues, Lisa Redepenning, has recently reported on a case in which an employer was penalized more than $600,000 for failing to  properly examine and document its employees’ identity and immigration status.

Narges Kakalia, a member in the litigation section in our New York office, recently sat down with Mintz alumna Flora Feng, Senior Director & Legal Counsel, Asia Pacific Region for PepsiCo to discuss career transitions, the cultural differences of working in Thailand, and work-life balance.

The NLRB recently reversed 37 years of precedent in deciding to adopt a new standard for a union’s access to witness statements taken in pre-grievance arbitration employer investigations.

My colleague Bret Cohen was quoted in a Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Online article entitled, “Employing Minors Requires Attention to Laws” (membership required), addressing some of the constraints that apply to the hiring of minors.

Alden Bianchi, Chair of Mintz Levin's Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation Practice, will provide a weekly installment on the complex reporting obligations outlined by the Affordable Care Act for health insurance carriers and employers. In this 24-week series, Alden will explain key requirements as he counts down to the January 2016 ACA reporting deadlines.

A panel appointed by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recommended a minimum hourly wage increase to $15 for fast food service workers on Wednesday.

A New York federal court recently said that the plaintiff-employees involved in a wage and hour lawsuit are not required to produce their immigration documents and information.  The case is important because it limits an employer’s ability to defend against such claims based on their workers’ potential illegal immigration status.

In a sweeping decision, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that Title VII prohibits sexual orientation-based discrimination.

In my last article I promised to examine as part of my Corporate Divorce Series whether alimony (though the politically correct term these days is “spousal support”) is like unemployment (I’m pretty sure it is still acceptable to use that term).

Allen Smith at SHRM Online continues his coverage of the DOL's proposed overtime rules in this latest article, "Overtime Proposed Rule Will Result in 'Hard Choices' for Some Employers," which looks at the difficult choices employers are facing in deciding how best to cope with the expected new rules.

In a refreshing decision for employers, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this month tossed an eyebrow-raising NLRB decision which permitted AT&T customer-facing and publicly visible technicians to wear faux prison garb in customers’ homes and in public.

Alden Bianchi, Chair of the Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation Practice, will provide a weekly installment on the complex reporting obligations outlined by the Affordable Care Act for health insurance carriers and employers.

It turns out the answer to this question depends on the reason for the move and whether California law applies to the contract. We all know that California is finicky when it comes to non-competes – so much so that generally speaking, non-competes aren’t valid in California.