News

Today, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) published its long-awaited new rules governing who is exempt and non-exempt from receiving overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).  Since 2004, employees have been properly classified as exempt if they met three tests: 1) a salary level test; 2) a salaried basis test; and 3) a duties test.  The new rules only affect the salary level test.  Under the old rules, an employee had to be paid at least $455 per week to satisfy this test.  The new rules, which will go into effect on December 1, 2016, will require that...

On May 12, 2016, a Federal Court ruled that the Affordable Care Act (also referred to as the “ACA” or “Obamacare”) has a fundamental flaw in its funding structure.  (U.S. House of Representatives v. Burwell, Civil Action No. 14-1967 [D.C. Dist. Ct., 5/12/16].)  Under the ACA, the federal government makes payments to insurance companies (under the law’s “cost-sharing” provisions) to offset their costs for offering reduced deductibles, co-pays, etc. on the ACA Health Exchanges.   However, the court noted that the ACA does not include a provision which makes a permanent appropriation for these cost-sharing payments.  In other words, the federal...

On the heels of its newly-proposed overtime regulations, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has issued new guidance which suggests that very few workers in the U.S. are properly classified as independent contractors. While the DOL official responsible for the guidance maintains that this is not a change in the Agency’s policies or regulations, statements like “an agreement between an employer and a worker designating or labeling the worker as an independent contractor … is not relevant to the analysis of the worker’s status” suggest otherwise.  In the Administrator’s Interpretation (No. 2015-1) issued on July 15, 2015, DOL Administrator David...

Not all “reasonable accommodations” are created equal. Both Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (Title VII) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) require employers to “reasonably accommodate” employees. Title VII requires reasonable accommodation of an employee’s religious beliefs and practices and the ADA requires reasonable accommodation of an employee’s disabilities. Despite the use of the same phrase in both laws, they have very different meanings because of what is considered unreasonable according to these laws. Under Title VII, a religious accommodation is considered unreasonable (or an “undue hardship”) for the employer, if it creates “more than de minimis”...

In what could turn out to be the most anti-employer, pro-union, decision of the Obama-era National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB” or “Board”), the Board recently ruled that employees who have access to employer-provided email systems can use that access to communicate with other employees about forming a union. While there will likely be a legal challenge to this decision, employers seeking to comply with this new ruling will need to make some difficult decisions about their email use policies and practices. Case Facts In this landmark case (Purple Communications, Inc. and Communications Workers of America, AFL–CIO), the NLRB invalidated a fairly...