If you have followed our blog over the past year, you are aware of the long and tortured history of the National Labor Relations Board’s joint employer standard. The recent history starts with the Obama Board’s decision to overturn decades of case law. But the saga continued.
Just last month, we reported on the…
What should a Pennsylvania employer do when an employee seeks workers’ compensation benefits after injuring himself by engaging in risky behavior at work? Companies may be tempted to take the position that workers’ compensation isn’t available to workers who hurt themselves by intentionally doing dangerous things on the job. Recently, however, the Commonwealth Court found…
In September, President Trump nominated management-side labor and employment lawyer Peter Robb to replace Richard Griffin, whose term expired on November 4, 2017, as general counsel to the National Labor Relations Board. Yesterday, the United States Senate confirmed Robb’s appointment to the position.
As general counsel, Robb will play an important role at the NLRB. …
An ever-increasing number of employers are sponsoring wellness incentives as a means of encouraging employees to developing healthy habits. In turn, employers gain healthier, more productive work forces. Wellness incentive programs aren’t without their risks, however. In this podcast, Denise Elliott discusses whether employees are covered by workers’ compensation benefits for injuries sustained while…
Our friends in the Intellectual Property Group know that an employer’s trade secrets are among its most valuable assets. In this podcast, Carol Steinour Young shares the ways in which employers can protect trade secrets in the midst of employee defections.
LGBTQ workplace rights is perhaps the most rapidly evolving area in employment law. On October 4, 2017, United States Attorney General Jeff Sessions formally weighed in on the topic. He issued a memorandum to all federal prosecutors declaring that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not prohibit employment discrimination based on…
Most employers take proactive steps to prevent and eliminate workplace harassment. Until recently, courts recognized and rewarded the proactive approach. Businesses in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware could avoid liability for hostile work environment claims if they rooted out the problem before it became “severe and pervasive.”
Courts had long held that a single slur,…
Prior to June 20, 2017, a powerful tool was available to employers and workers’ compensation carriers to cap exposure on long term workers’ compensation claims. That tool, provided by the Act 44 amendments in 1996, was called an impairment rating evaluation (IRE) and generally worked like this: once a claimant had received 104 weeks of…
Workplace rights for LGBT individuals has been a rapidly developing area of the law. A little over two years ago, former President Obama signed an executive order prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating against employees on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs followed suit by issuing…
In 2015, we discussed the new joint-employer standard that was articulated by the National Labor Relations Board in Browning-Ferris Industries of California, Inc. As a reminder, the NLRB held that a joint-employer relationship may be found if two or more entities “are both employers within the meaning of common law, and if they share or…
