In May of 2013, some Walmart employees boarded buses bound for Bentonville, Arkansas to attend the Company’s annual shareholders meeting. The buses formed a caravan, picking up employees at Walmart locations on the way. The employees handed strike letters to their managers before departing. The caravan was dubbed the “Ride for Respect.” It was organized by OUR Walmart, a group formed with the assistance of the United Food and Commercial Worker Union (UFCW).…

Last week, I attended a training seminar hosted by the EEOC.  Sharon Rennart, a Senior Attorney Advisor at the EEOC, presented in part on how the ADA may apply to employees with Opioid Use Disorder (“OUD”).  OUD may be diagnosed where there is a problematic pattern of use leading to clinically significant impairment or distress, manifested over a 12-month period by the presence of at least two out of eleven elements, including:…

On July 15, 2019, the EEOC opened the online portal that employers should utilize to submit the 2017 and 2018 pay data required by the revised EEO-1 form.  …

As promised, today we give you and third and final installment of our three-part series addressing the new opinion letters issued by the U.S. Department of Labor on July 1, 2019.  To read about the other letters issued by the DOL, check out this blog post and this blog post.  The final opinion letter, FLSA2019-9, addresses permissible rounding practices for calculating the number of hours worked by an employee.…

In our last blog post, we revealed a three-part series intended to address the new opinion letters issued by the U.S. Department of Labor on July 1, 2019.  The second of these opinion letters, FLSA2019-8, addresses whether paralegals employed by a trade organization are exempt from minimum wage and overtime requirements under Section 13(a)(1) of the FLSA – an issue of admittedly more limited interest, except as to employers of such individuals.…

On July 1, 2019, the U.S. Department of Labor issued three new opinion letters that address compliance issues related to the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”).  These letters are official, written opinions by the Department’s Wage and Hour Division that respond to fact-specific scenarios posed by employers and employees alike.  We are going to address each of the opinion letters in separate blog posts over the course of the next week.  But for now, let’s…

A recent case caused me significant concern on behalf of employers. As you may know, before an employee may file a federal discrimination lawsuit against their employer, they must first file a charge of discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (And, on a related note, just recently, the U.S. Supreme Court held that this charge-filing requirement was a procedural one that could be waived by the employer, as we discussed in our E-lert).…