Unlimited paid time off (“PTO”) is one of the new “it” workplace policies.  Adopted as both a means to attract and retain employees as well as to avoid having to coordinating and track specific grants of paid PTO or vacation– a task which can be arduous, particularly for smaller businesses – some employers have done away with traditional accrual-based PTO and vacation policies and instead offer employees the opportunity to take as much PTO as…

As we previously reported here, the issue of whether obesity is a legally-protected impairment is complex, and jurisdictions differ on the extent to which they consider obesity to be a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”).  On June 12, 2019, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit joined the Second, Sixth, and Eighth Circuits in holding that without evidence that an underlying physiological disorder caused the individual’s extreme obesity,…

It’s been an active few weeks since our last State Law Round-Up in mid-April 2019, with a number of bills being signed into new laws and case developments impacting employers in many US states over the past few weeks. Colorado Failure to Pay Wages as Theft Effective January 1, 2020, an employer’s failure to pay wages will be classified as criminal theft in Colorado.  Under the new law, an employer commits wage theft when…

A federal judge recently ordered that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) collect two years of Component 2 EEO-1 data, including employees’ hours worked and W-2 compensation information, from employers with 100 or more employees (and federal contractors with 50 or more employees) by September 30, 2019 (see our post here).  The agency was given two options: (1) require employers to provide 2017 pay data in addition to the 2018 data by September 30,…

Expanding on her previous post on the subject, on May 1, 2019, Law360 published the following expert analysis authored by Squire Patton Boggs labor and employment attorney Melissa Legault. After 11 private conferences during which the U.S. Supreme Court justices debated whether to hear the cases, the Supreme Court granted certiorari[1] in three cases involving the extent of protection — if any — provided by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against employment-based discrimination…

As we previously reported here, on April 3, 2019, the White House Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”) filed a brief with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia proposing a September 30, 2019 deadline for the EEOC to complete collection of the required 2018 EEO-1 pay data forms. The brief was filed in response to a March 4, 2019 court order lifting a 2017 stay of pay data collection, which had…

The Court’s ruling in Lamps Plus, Inc., et al. v. Varela is the latest in the Court’s ongoing pro-employer, pro-arbitration jurisprudence As we first reported here, the United States Supreme Court’s docket this term includes three significant cases interpreting various aspects of the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”).  Earlier this year, the Court ruled in the first of those cases, Henry Schein, et al. v. Archer & White Sales, Inc. (see our discussion here),…