Employment Law

Offer health benefits to all, regardless of age

05/12/2025

Under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Older Workers Benefit Protection Act, it’s illegal to offer different benefits to workers ages 40 and older than you offer to younger employees. That’s true even if it costs you more to provide the same benefits to older workers.

Watch out for dress codes that could trigger ADA lawsuits

05/09/2025

Enforce your dress and grooming code too rigidly and you could find yourself on the losing end of a failure-to-accommodate lawsuit. Here’s a case showing that common medical problems may require employers to bend their dress-code rules to accommodate employee disabilities.

Beware unintended consequences of sharing pay info

05/09/2025

It’s increasingly difficult for employers to keep employees from finding out how much their co-workers are paid. However, a new study shows the unintended consequences when employers tell employees where they stand on pay.

New DOL guidance invokes old classification standard, making it easier to treat workers as contractors

05/07/2025

The Department of Labor will no longer enforce its 2024 independent contractor rule, issued during the Biden administration, which favored classifying workers as employees. Instead, it will rewind the classification clock, emphasizing an old standard that makes it much easier to consider workers to be contractors.

Almost all OFCCP enforcement staff placed on leave

05/05/2025

Most employees who handle enforcement at the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs have been placed on administrative leave, according to Bloomberg Law. The move affected employees in OFCCP’s national office in Washington, D.C. and five of six regional offices across the country.

Cure intermittent leave headaches by relying on FMLA certification

05/05/2025

Unfortunately, intermittent FMLA leave is easy for employees to abuse. Fortunately, the FMLA certification documentation that employees must provide is the key to easing the HR headaches that intermittent leave often causes.

Be better! Anti-harassment training, half-hearted investigations aren’t enough

05/02/2025

Why aren’t anti-harassment policies more effective at preventing harassment? The answer may lie in ineffective training and the failure of employers to follow their own policies.

Executive order directs EEOC, other agencies to ‘deprioritize’ disparate-impact discrimination

04/28/2025

The order, issued April 23 and titled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” contends that the threat of being sued for disparate-impact discrimination prevents employers from hiring the best-qualified candidates, promoting successful employees and generally running their businesses as they see fit.

Be prepared to offer non-traditional ADA accommodations

04/28/2025

We usually think of ADA accommodations as those that allow employees to perform the essential functions of their jobs. Other forms of ADA accommodation don’t directly affect essential job functions. Instead, they help employees manage their disabilities.

Understand marijuana laws in every jurisdiction where you operate

04/25/2025

Employers can require employees accused of violence at work to take a drug test. But what happens if the test reveals the presence of marijuana in the system of an employee whose use of medical marijuana is authorized by state law?