Skip to main content

What I've Been Reading This Week


The Supreme Court's decision earlier this summer in Janus v. AFSCME has continued to reverberate in the labor law arena time and time again.  In particular, an article from The Huffington Post highlighted one union's efforts to stymie the potential negative impact of Janus.  Whether it will be successful (or even catch on elsewhere) is up for debate.  However, this union's efforts to survive in a post Janus world are worth highlighting.

As always, below are a couple articles that caught my eye this week.



Hurricane Michael, Work, & Whether An Employer Has to Pay Employees When the Office is Closed

Hopefully readers that are (or were in the path of Hurricane Michael) are safe and managed to avoid the brunt of the storm.  For those that have had to deal with the hurricane this week, many likely had their work schedules disrupted.  The question inevitably turns to whether the employer still has to pay its employees when the office/workplace is closed because of a storm such as this (although this article is applicable to other related events such as ice storms, blizzards, tornadoes, etc).  As this article notes, there can be some differences depending on the laws of a particular state, but in general, an exempt employee that has worked any portion of the workweek must be paid their entire salary.  Of course employers can require that these exempt employees use their paid time off first, but for an employee that has no paid time off, an employer cannot refuse to pay these employees.  As for non-exempt employees, an employer does not have to pay these non-exempt employees when the office/worksite is closed.


Following Janus, Some Unions Get Back to the Basics To Help With Retention

Back in June, the United States Supreme Court issued a much talked about decision in Janus v. AFSCME that held that government workers could not be required to pay agency fees to a union to represent them.  As a result, millions of public sector workers across the country were suddenly given the opportunity to withdraw from their union, not pay the union any more agency fees, yet still have the union represent them in the collective bargaining process.  As Dave Jamieson at The Huffington Post writes, that threw many public sector unions into a state of flux with their members now having the ability to withdraw from their unions and not pay agency fees.  However, one particular public sector union, the Peoria Federation of Teachers, decided to get down to the basics and start talking with and listening to its members in an effort to strengthen its image among workers as providing them with a needed benefit in the workplace.  This past summer, the union sent two public school teachers around Peoria to sit and listen to their fellow educators with an emphasis on achieving a bottom up organizing model focused on involving members more deeply with the union and setting its agenda.  Whether this grass roots sort of engagement proves to be effective in retaining public sector union members is difficult to say at this point...but in the interim, it appears to be making some public sector unions reevaluate how they operate, in a turbulent time following Janus.


Updated: Hello Amazon $15/Hour Pay Raise, Goodbye Amazon Bonuses and Stock Awards

Last week, Amazon announced that by November 1st, it would raise the hourly pay rate for its U.S. employees to $15/hour.  (For hourly employees already earning over $15/hour, the company will raise those hourly wage rates by $1).  Amazon employees, the Fight for $15 movement, U.S. Senators, and others cheered this news as a groundbreaking and potentially far reaching development that could trigger other large scale employers in the U.S. to follow suit.  However, Spencer Soper at Bloomberg noted that while Amazon is raising the hourly minimum wage rate for its U.S. employees, the company is also eliminating monthly bonuses and stock awards for many of its hourly employees.  With that being said, Amazon pointed out that these workers will still see their total compensation increase.  In the long run, I suspect that many hourly workers will be drawn (initially) to the $15/hour wage rate rather than the opportunity to earn bonuses or stock awards.  For the time being, the loss of these portions of an Amazon employee's hourly compensation package has not gained much traction.  Let us see whether the take home pay of these employees does indeed increase after November 1st, as the company has stated.


California Employers & Employees, Take Note: Governor Brown Signs Several Relevant Bills Into Law

On September 30th, California Governor Jerry Brown signed several bills into law that will impact California employers and employees alike.  The bills, namely SB 820, SB1300, SB 1343, SB1412, AB 1976, AB 2079, AB 2338, and AB 3082, cover a range of employment law matters including confidentiality provisions in settlement agreements (relating to workplace harassment/assaults), criminal background checks during the application process, and the requirement that an employer make a reasonable effort to provide employees with the use of a room or other location for lactation in the workplace, among other topics.  This article from The National Law Review is worth a quick read for an update on these new bills that were recently signed into law.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

NLRB: Discussion Among Employees About Tip Pooling is Protected Concerted Activity

  This Advice Memorandum from the National Labor Relations Board’s Associate General Counsel, Jayme Sophir, addressed whether employees which discussed and complained about tip pooling at work constituted protected concerted activity. In relevant part, an employer in New York operated a chain of steakhouses.  While tip pooling was in place at these steakhouses, some of the employees objected to it on the grounds that it was not transparent and improperly divided tips among the workers.  Employees were told not to complain or talk to each other about the tip pool and were told that doing so would endanger their jobs.  Despite the employer later attempting to provide some clarity as to how the tips were being divided, rancor still existed among some employees.  At one point, the employees were told by a general manager that some employees that had been talking about the tip pool were “cleared out” and the employer would continue to do so. In the Advice Memorandum, it was noted that emplo

What I’ve Been Reading This Week

A few years ago, I remember when the “Fight for $15” movement was taking off around the country.  Lo and behold, it appears that a $15/hour minimum wage is not the stopping point, which should be no surprise.  As the below article notes, New York is aggressively moving to ramp up hourly wage rates even higher.  While all the  below articles are worth a read, I called particular attention to that one. As always, below are a couple article that caught my eye this week. Disney World Workers Reject Latest Contract Offer Late last week, it was announced that workers at Disney World had rejected the most recent contract offer from the company, calling on their employer to do better.  As Brooks Barnes at The New York Times writes, the unions that represent about 32,000 workers at Disney World reported their members resoundingly rejected the 5 year contract offer which would have seen workers receive a 10% raise and retroactive increased back pay.  While Disney’s offer would have increased pa

Utah Non-Compete Bill Falters in House

Last month, a non-compete bill sponsored by Representative Brian Greene (Republican from Pleasant Grove) & up for vote in the Utah House failed to make it through the Legislature.  The bill sought to ban enforcement of non-competes if they came after a worker was already employed, given no compensation (such as a bonus or promotion) for signing the non-compete, and laid off within six months.  However, by a 22 - 49 vote, the bill was resoundingly defeated after some business groups lobbied to kill the non-compete bill.  One group in particular, The Free Enterprise Utah coalition, argued that the Utah State Legislature should hold off on any changes to non compete laws in the state until a survey about non competes was done among Utah businesses.  Representative Greene had countered this claim and argued that a survey was not needed to show that the current non compete laws in the states allowed many businesses, including some small high tech companies in the state, to per