Labor & Employment Law Update

A U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) memorandum-issued policy is at the heart of a court case challenging recent H-1B visa denials.

The “Contracts and Itineraries Requirements for H-1B Petitions Involving Third-Party Worksites” memo was issued on February 20, 2018 without any notice or comment period required by the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). The memo directs adjudicators to ensure a contractor has actual and exclusive “control” of the contractor’s employees at the third-party site as a criterion for visa approval. This requirement comes ...

The workplace is changing: Millennials, Generation Z-ers, and Baby Boomers looking to supplement their retirement income. These individuals are more interested in autonomy and avoiding bad managers, office politics and lengthy, non-productive staff meetings. Plus, the tax-savvy individual knows the economic advantage of having access to traditional business deductions through a Schedule C, rather than being limited to the standard deduction or itemizing as a W-2 employee would be.

More and more businesses also seem to be interested in the advantages of a gig workforce, also ...

t appears Illinois will become the 11^th state to permit recreational cannabis. Once Governor Pritzker signs the legislation, as promised, beginning January 1, 2020, the Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act (“Act”), will allow adults (21+) in Illinois to possess and consume cannabis. While there is a lot “rolled” into the 600 plus page law (pun intended), there are significant employment pitfalls for employers with regard to enforcing drug free workplaces.

The Act expressly permits employers to adopt and enforce “reasonable” and nondiscriminatory zero ...

The CDC reports that half of all Americans will experience mental illness at some point in their lives. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, 46.6 million adults in the U.S., roughly 1 in 5, experience some form of mental illness in a given year, and for 11.2 million Americans each year, roughly 1 in 25, the condition is sufficiently severe and substantially limits major life activities. Yet, despite the wide prevalence of these conditions, our society continues to stigmatize mental illness. As a result, conditions often go untreated leading to reduced employee ...

EEO-1 report filers should prepare to submit Component 2 pay data for both calendar years 2017 and 2018 by September 30, 2019. As we previously reported, the U.S. District Court for the District Court of Columbia previously ruled that employers must submit pay data for calendar year 2018 by September 30, 2019. In this ruling, the court also presented the EEOC with the option to either collect pay data for calendar year 2017 or calendar year 2019. The EEOC recently announced that it will collect pay data for calendar year 2017. Pay data for both 2017 and 2018 will be due September 30 ...

In an effort to try and help root out discrimination, the Illinois legislature has followed California’s top-down approach of regulating the boardroom to ensure that decision makers include historically disenfranchised classes.

On March 29, 2019, the Illinois House sent HB 3394 to the Senate.  HB 3394 is modeled after California Corporations Code § 301.3, which requires publically held corporations (domestic and foreign corporations that list their outstanding shares on a major U.S. Stock Exchange), which state on their SEC Form 10-K that the principal executive ...

In only the latest of potential blows to companies that collect or use biometric data, an Illinois Appellate Court has ruled that claims brought by employees of the Four Seasons luxury hotel for alleged violations of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) are not subject to arbitration under the workers’ respective employment agreements with the hotel. Liu v. Four Seasons Hotel, Ltd., 2019 IL App (1st) 182645.

The BIPA was enacted to protect the privacy of individuals’ biometric data. It governs the collection, use, safeguarding, handling, storage ...

On April 25, 2019, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that employers must submit pay data by September 30, 2019. For a more detailed background on the case at issue, National Women’s Law Center v. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), please see our blog from last month. As a brief background, years ago the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) set out to collect pay data from employers in an effort to identify and address pay discrimination against women and minority workers. The EEOC already collects data from employers regarding the sex ...

Company sponsored volunteer activities foster a positive corporate culture and can improve employee engagement and morale. On March 14, 2019, the U.S. Department of Labor issued an Opinion Letter that makes wage and hour compliance associated with corporate volunteer campaigns a bit easier. The Opinion Letter clarifies that employers are not required to pay non-exempt employees for volunteer time outside their normal work hours so long as participation is truly voluntary and the employer does not direct the volunteer activities. The DOL further confirmed that an employer can ...

Having handled countless prevailing wage disputes, the local, state or federal administrative agency assigned to administer compliance (i.e. the US Department of Labor) is the only government entity that can lawfully determine whether a contractor is in violation of an applicable prevailing wage law and push for debarment.  Ultimately, a contractor who has been determined by a government agency to have violated its prevailing wage obligations (i.e. a clerical mistake, an accounting error, poor or missing paperwork) is a long way from getting on a “debarment list.” First, in ...