Original post on June 1, 2021 (“Making the Workplace a Safer Place: A Job for New York’s HERO Act”) Key takeaways for New York employers from the NY HERO Act, as amended: The NYS DOL must publish a model safety standard by July 5, 2021. 30 days thereafter, New York employers must either adopt the model standard or create their own health and safety plan to prevent occupational exposure to airborne infectious diseases, which meets…

On January 21, 2021, President Biden enacted the Executive Order “Protecting Worker Health and Safety” which tasked OSHA with developing safety measures to help protect workers as the nation continued its post-pandemic reopening. On June 10, 2021, in response to that direction, OSHA issued an emergency temporary standard (“ETS”) focused on healthcare settings where workers are most likely to have contact with individuals infected by the virus. Below are some of the salient points of…

Tuesday, June 22nd at 12:30pm ET Restrictive Covenants 101: NDAs, Non-Competes & Other Tools To Protect Your Company A company’s confidential information and customer relationships are its lifeblood—and are the assets that can walk out the door too easily with a departing employee. Too few companies take a considered approach to protecting those assets. NDAs and noncompetes can help, but using them without a holistic strategy can be worse than no protection at all. Join…

Employers have been waiting for some definitive guidance from the EEOC on the issue of vaccines in the workplace – and here it is! On May 28, the EEOC updated its Technical Assistance Guidance and has now stated with certainty that employers CAN indeed require employees to be vaccinated before coming in to the office or workplace. The updated guidance also addresses accommodations for the vaccinated, vaccine incentives, and vaccines for pregnant employees, among other…

During the Trump years, the National Labor Relations Board (meaning, the actual five-member Board in Washington, whose decisions drive interpretations of federal labor law) got a lot less friendly to organized labor, and a lot friendlier to employers. That meant a lot of things, including making it easier for unions to prove that two employers were really one “joint” employer, harder for employees to organize, and harder for employers to unilaterally change terms and conditions…

Last week, the Trump-era independent contractor classification rule was officially eradicated by the U.S. Department of Labor, (“DOL”) due to its apparent inconsistency with the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”). The rule, which we previously covered here, provided a 5-factor “economic reality” test for determining whether workers are independent contractors or employees. The two “core factors” of the test included the nature and degree of the worker’s control over the work and the worker’s…