In 2006, Arizona voters approved a ballot measure which resulted in the passage of the Arizona Minimum Wage Act and established a state-wide minimum wage (currently $11.00/hour).  This law also permitted individual Arizona counties, cities, and towns to regulate both the minimum wage and the employee benefits to be provided by private employers located within their geographic boundaries.  That meant that local governments could establish a minimum wage higher (but not lower) than the statewide…

Former National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB” or “Board”) two-term Chairman and Member Mark Gaston Pearce announced on February 6, 2019 that he would not seek renomination to the Board.  Mr. Pearce – a former union-side lawyer who was appointed by President Obama – served until the end of his second term on August 27, 2018.  To the surprise of many, given his active role in deciding many union- and employee-friendly decisions, including the now infamous…

Majority Rules That Skycap’s Complaint About Bad Tipping Was Not Protected Concerted Activity The National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB” or “Board”) kicked off 2019 with an important decision that significantly narrowed the standard for when an individual employee’s conduct will be found to be “protected concerted activity” under the National Labor Relations Act (“NLRA” or “Act”).  In so doing, the Republican-majority Board took another step towards restoring the pre-Obama era conservativism to the NLRB’s interpretation…

On January 15, 2019, the United States Supreme Court held in New Prime Inc. v. Oliveira that a trucking company could not compel its drivers, which it classified as independent contractors, to arbitrate their wage and hour claims against the company because Congress intended to exempt all interstate transportation workers from the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”).  Section 1 of the FAA exempts “contracts of employment of seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of workers…

As the Supreme Court’s October 2018 term opened, we wrote about three significant cases on its docket involving arbitration, each of which are likely to have an impact on the arbitration of employment-related claims.  The Court issued its decision in the first of those cases on January 8, 2019.  In his first opinion since joining the Court, Justice Kavanaugh authored the opinion in Henry Schein, et al. v. Archer & White Sales, Inc.  The…

Much attention over the past few years has been given to the ongoing saga concerning the standard applied by National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB” or “Board”) to determine when two unrelated business entities share sufficient control over a group of employees such that they may be deemed “joint employers” under the National Labor Relations Act (“NLRA”) – and therefore jointly liable for obligations and liabilities under that statute.  Going back to 2015, in Browning-Ferris Industries…

On December 7, 2018, the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) issued its 2019-2022 Strategic Plan, which focuses on four primary goals.  First, the Board targets a 20% decrease, collectively, in the time required to resolve unfair labor practice charges from filing to resolution.  This collective decrease is to be accomplished through incremental decreases of 5% of the time spent in each of four stages of the charge process, including: 1) the initial charge intake stage…