State Employment Law Articles

The Philadelphia City Council has passed the Philadelphia Fair Workweek Employment Standards Ordinance, intended to regulate scheduling practices for the employers in the city in the hospitality, retail, and food services industries. Mayor Jim Kenney (D) is expected to sign the Ordinance, which woul

For employers with Washington State operations, what happened in 2018 does not necessarily stay in 2018. Those bidding 2018 farewell cannot say goodbye to various paid sick and safe time (PSST) policy, notice, and leave calculation obligations in 2019. Additionally, employers with unionized workforc

It started in June 2018 with a hotel bellman’s claiming in court that he had injured his abdomen, back, and shoulder while picking up luggage and ended in September 2018 with our attorneys’ convincing a judge to dismiss the man’s workers’ compensation claim.

Executive Summary: On December 4, 2018, the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) adopted rules mandating a minimum wage for app-hailed drivers. According to the TLC, approximately 80,000 affected drivers stand to earn an average of $10,000 more per year. FordHarrison recently wrote abou

For decades, American employers have used the legally endorsed policy of rounding employees’ time to the nearest quarter hour. This has always been permissible, provided the policy was neutral in effect, meaning that on balance employees were not underpaid as a result. Back in the days not so long a

A California appellate court held an employer’s use of a rounding policy for its non-exempt employees complied with California law because it did not disfavor employees. (Donohue v. AMN Services, LLC (Dec. 10, 2018) Case No. D071865.)

The Westchester County Board of Legislation recently passed legislation banning the box — that is, removing the checkable criminal record box from employment applications. The law, which is expected to be signed by the Westchester County Executive and go into effect 90 days later, would prohibit inq

The California Supreme Court has upheld the ability of California health care workers who work more than twelve hours a day voluntarily to waive their second meal period, rebuffing plaintiffs’ argument that their voluntary waivers were unenforceable. (Gerard v. Orange Coast Memorial Medical Center (

Just over a year has passed since the New York Department of Labor (DOL) released proposed regulations that would require employers to pay employees who are called in to work without appropriate notice or whose schedules are not set in advance, referring to this guarantee as “call in pay,” “on call

On November 30, 2018, Suffolk County of Long Island, New York joined other municipalities and states across the country when it unanimously enacted the Restricting Information on Salaries and Earnings (RISE) Act, prohibiting employers in Suffolk County from requesting or seeking wage histories of jo

The Westchester County Board of Legislation recently passed legislation banning the box — that is, removing the checkable criminal record box from employment applications. The law, which is expected to be signed by the Westchester County Executive and go into effect 90 days later, would prohibit inq

The New York State Department of Labor (NYSDOL) has issued sweeping proposed regulations addressing worker scheduling practices that will affect most employers in the state (though employers covered by the Hospitality Wage Order — hotels and restaurants — are not covered by the current proposed regu

On December 7, 2018, the New York Department of Labor (NYDOL) proposed a new set of “predictable scheduling” regulations in an effort to discourage on-call shifts and require employers to pay employees for cancelled shifts.1 With this new proposal, employers have another opportunity to comment on th

When implementing restrictive covenant agreements in their workforces, companies often grapple with how best to handle the wide variation in the law from one state to the other. One solution is to include a choice of law provision that calls for all agreements to be construed under the laws of a sin

Suffolk County, New York has passed a law making it unlawful for employers and employment agencies with four or more employees to inquire about a job applicant’s salary history or otherwise to rely on such information in setting a new employee’s compensation. Entitled A Local Law to Restrict Informa

Executive Summary: Last month, California’s Fourth District Court of Appeal issued AMN Healthcare, Inc. v. Aya Healthcare Servs., Inc., 28 Cal. App. 5th 923 (Cal. Ct. App. 2018), a decision calling into question the validity of non-solicitation of employees a/k/a anti-piracy provisions in California

Effective January 1, 2019, Florida's minimum wage rate will increase from $8.25 per hour to $8.46 per hour. The increase is calculated by the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity and is based on the percentage increase in the Consumer Price Index for the South Region.

In a recent appellate court opinion of first impression in New Jersey, the Appellate Division reversed a trial court’s order compelling arbitration and found the parties’ failure to identify any arbitration forum or the process for choosing that forum was not a “meeting of minds.” Pursuant to basic

On November 28, 2018, the California Business & Industrial Alliance (an association that represents the interests of small and mid-sized businesses in California and which was formed for the specific purpose of accomplishing the appeal or reform of the Private Attorney General Act (“PAGA”)) filed a

Emily Haigh and Devjani Mishra from Littler’s Manhattan office provide the inside scoop on some of New York City’s newest workplace regulations. Emily and Devjani first explore how the cooperative dialogue ordinance affects the procedures that employers use to evaluate employee accommodation request