Multinational Employers

The US Department of Labor and the Ministry of Labor (MOL) of Honduras have put together a program designed to benefit US employers in certain industries and Honduran employees. The agreement was signed in September 2019, and as of January 2020, the details continue to be fine tuned in order to impl

Our European practice, spread across 13 offices in the region’s most robust economies, can provide a single point of contact for clients’ global labor and employment needs. Here we highlight significant labor and employment issues in seven European countries.

In his Employment Issues column, Philip Berkowitz discusses issues surrounding global workplace harassment investigations. Because U.S. anti-harassment policies were engineered for the U.S. at-will employment environment, simply exporting these tools into overseas investigations may cause problems.

As Brexit negotiations are coming to a head, companies may need to take stock of the current situation and strategize about how to maintain employment of current EU national employees and how to prepare for the post-Brexit landscape.

France’s labor code does not ordinarily consider an employee’s commute as effective working time. When the commute’s length surpasses the usual trip between one's home and the workplace, however, the employee must be compensated with either time or money. This leaves room for questions regarding emp

The deadline to comply with the GDPR’s complex and far ranging requirements is rapidly approaching. As your organization races to implement its compliance program before the May 25, 2018 effective date, questions and concerns are likely to arise. While there is no shortage of online guidance on the

U.S. organizations that control or process the personal data of European Union residents likely are subject to the EU’s new data protection requirements, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR takes effect on May 25, 2018.

For the vast majority of employment relationships around the world, choice-of-law analysis is a non-issue that we rarely ever think about. Obviously (for example), a Paris-resident baker working locally for a French bakery is protected only by French employment law. A Buenos Aires-resident banker wo

In its recent Grand Chamber judgment,1 the European Court of Human Rights held that employers can monitor an employee's email only if they provide advance notice. By a vote of 11-6, the Court found that failure to provide such notice constitutes a violation of article 8 of the European Convention on

Most all major U.S. employers, and many smaller ones, have issued and periodically update employee handbooks—staff guides explaining how the organization’s particular workplace works. U.S. human resources experts almost unanimously recommend handbooks as tools for both running human resources and co

The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issued its decision in the case of B?rbulescu v. Romania (application no. 61496/08) on September 5, an appeal from a determination by the Romanian courts upholding an employee’s termination for personal use of the employer’s computer sys

With summer holidays over and only eight months remaining in the two-year enforcement grace period, U.S. multinational employers and their European Union (EU) subsidiaries have little time to spare before starting to address compliance with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR or the “R

Multinationals inevitably vary their employee compensation packages—their pay rates, employee incentives, bonus plans, benefits offerings—by country of employment. It is pointless to inquire into some multinational’s entry-level total compensation package for its managers, engineers, in-house lawyer

Equal employment opportunity initiatives—human resources policies, handbook and code of conduct provisions, compliance standards, training modules and dispute resolution procedures that address discrimination, harassment and diversity—have long been vital to U.S. employers. In the global economy, th

The question of whether a multinational must translate employee communications overseas traditionally was not asked very often. Decades ago, multinationals ran their international operations as siloed units. Headquarters exercised little day-to-day oversight over foreign personnel matters and transm

Effective May 30, 2017, Japan amended its omnibus data protection law, the Personal Information Protection Act (“PIPA”), to add new compliance requirements that will have an immediate impact on many U.S. multinational employers with employees in Japan. As with the European Union’s recent revamping o

The White House formally notified Congress on Thursday of the Trump administration’s intent to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The notification letter from U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer marked the start of a 90-day window to consult with members of Congress

“Posting of workers,” a common practice within the European Union, refers to the assignment of an employee to work in another EU Member State (the "host country") on a temporary basis.1 Under this arrangement, also known as a secondment, the posted employee works in the host country but does not bec

Last month, the European Union and U.S. officials announced final approval of the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield (Privacy Shield), replacing the Safe Harbor which was invalidated by the Court of Justice of the European Union in October 2015. Like it predecessor, the Privacy Shield will allow organizations b

Since the European Court of Justice declared invalid, on October 6, 2015,1 the Safe Harbor agreement between the U.S. Department of Commerce and the European Commission for the transfer of personal data, hundreds of U.S. multinationals have been struggling to find an alternative while waiting hopefu