Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division issued its second Field Assistance Bulletin of the year. This one is all about protecting workers from retaliation. Retaliation occurs when an employer takes adverse action against an employee because they engaged in a protected activity. The Bulletin provides…
What I’m about to share with you today will never become a Hollywood blockbuster. Actually, it’s so dull that I would sell it over the counter as a holistic sleep aid if I could bottle it. Ambien’s got nothing on wage-and-hour minutiae. Early last year, after President Biden won the…
For those of you with businesses in Hawaii, most of Arizona, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and American Samoa, you can skip today’s post, and I’ll see you tomorrow. As for the rest of you, let’s talk about how to pay graveyard shift employees who…
Perhaps you didn’t study this for your SHRM-CP Certification – or even the bar exam. So I’m here to confirm that federal judges frown on employers threatening the families of employees cooperating in a Wage and Hour Division investigation or otherwise exercising their rights under the Fair Labor Standards Act.…
Last night on the U.S. Department of Labor’s website, I spent some time checking out some of the latest news releases from the Wage and Hour Division. Oh, hold on one second. I need to take this call. “Yes?” “Eric, it’s ‘1996 Eric.'” “Who?” “It’s you, err, me, from like…
In case you missed President Biden’s State of the Union Address last night, I’ve got you covered with everything HR compliance that came up. Pay equity and higher minimum wage. When President Biden took office in January 2021, part of his initial plan was to raise the federal minimum wage…
People ask me if I like to read. Not so much anymore, outside of reading Harry Potter books to my kids and reading graphic novels (ok, fine, comic books) to me. Social media apps like LinkedIn have eroded my attention span. I can barely make it through a few hundred…
ICYMI, the days of a more business-friendly U.S. Department of Labor are long gone. And it’s only going to become more adversarial. In the past year, the DOL has ended a program that would have allowed employers to self-report federal minimum wage and overtime violations under the Fair Labor Standards Act…
I’m going to share with you the Mysterious Case of the Disappearing U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division Fact Sheet No. 84. Last week, right around the time that my employment law colleagues and I were recording The Employer Handbook Zoom Office Hour (available here on The Employer…
dronepicr, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons We still don’t know **clicks refresh on the Supreme Court’s website** whether the OSHA vax-or-test mandate will survive Supreme Court scrutiny. But, in the meantime, the Biden Administration announced some big news yesterday about at-home COVID-19 tests. Starting on Saturday, January 15, 2022,…