On January 23, 2019, we reported that the Supreme Court had agreed to review a decision from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Ft. Bend County v. Davis, which would answer conclusively whether the pre-filing administrative exhaustion requirement is jurisdictional (meaning that failure to fully exhaust administrative remedies would bar litigation) or non-jurisdictional and thus subject to waiver. The Supreme Court issued its decision on June 3, 2019 and ruled that administrative exhaustion is non-jurisdictional…

Both New York City and California have recently taken steps to ban hairstyle-based discrimination.  On Monday, April 22, 2019, the California State Senate passed the CROWN Act (Create a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural Hair), which seeks to amend California’s anti-discrimination statute, the California Fair Housing and Employment Act (“FEHA”).   The CROWN Act, if passed by the State Assembly, would modify FEHA’s definition of “race” to expressly include “traits historically associated with one’s race,…

Expanding on their previous post on the subject, on April 3, 2019, Law360 published the following article authored by Squire Patton Boggs labor and employment attorneys Laura Lawless Robertson and Melissa Legault. The U.S. Department of Labor recently issued a trio of opinion letters offering employers guidance in implementing the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. The letter with the broadest application to U.S. employers is FMLA2019-1-A which deals with the issue…

On March 14, 2019, the U.S. Department of Labor (“DOL”), Wage and Hour Division, released an opinion letter, FMLA2019-1-A, stating that employers cannot delay the designation of FMLA-qualifying leave or designate more than 12 weeks of leave (or 26 weeks of military caregiver leave) as FMLA leave.…

For years – spanning two Presidential administrations – employers have been awaiting long-anticipated updates to the overtime exemption regulations to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).  Since 2004, to be exempt from the FLSA’s overtime compensation requirements under the so-called “white collar” exemptions (e.g., executive, administrative, professional employees), employees must be paid on a salary basis at least $455/week as well as perform specific, defined exempt duties.  In 2016, during the latter stages of the…

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”), employers are required to pay non-exempt employees a minimum hourly wage of $7.25.  However, employers with “tipped employees” are able to pay such employees a cash wage of $2.13 per hour and take a “tip credit” toward their minimum wage obligation to make up the difference between the cash wage and the federal minimum wage.  Importantly, the FLSA differentiates between tipped employees who perform “dual tasks,” such as…

On January 23, 2019, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (which hears appeals from the federal district courts in and for Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin) issued an en banc decision in Dale E. Kleber v. CareFusion Corporation, a case in which the court wrestled with whether applicants for employment may successfully pursue disparate impact claims under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), the federal law that prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis…