IRS Begins Enforcement of ACA Employer Mandate
The IRS recently began enforcing the employer mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) by assessing penalties on noncompliant employers for the 2015 calendar year. Read More ›
Categories: Affordable Care Act, Employee Benefits
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Are You Paying Your Employees Enough to Keep Them?
According to the Wall Street Journal on July 21st, for the first time in many years, pay for the lowest income Americans are rising faster than for any other group. Read More ›
Categories: Employment, Labor Relations, News, Wage and Hour
UAW Rips Off Employees Twice in Chrysler Fiasco
In a stunning development, reported Thursday by the Detroit Newspapers including Crain's Detroit, a former Chrysler labor negotiator was in collusion with several high executives of UAW and has pocketed more than $1.2 million worth of money and goods that was supposed to have been used for UAW employee training purposes. Read More ›
Categories: Labor Relations, Lawsuit
Employers Beware – Employees May Lawfully Record Workplace Discussions and Activities
In an effort to guard against workplace meetings or discussions being recorded and uploaded to social media for all to hear, and to protect employees against surreptitious recording of their conversations, many employers have implemented "no recording" policies. One such employer was Whole Foods Markets, which had two no-recording policies in place. Read More ›
Categories: National Labor Relations Board
Contractors Face Jail Time for Worker Fatalities
In a growing trend nationwide, owners of companies whose employees die in the workplace from workplace related accidents are increasingly looking at jail time, not just high OSHA or state OSHA penalties. Read More ›
Categories: OSHA and MIOSHA, Safety
Supervisor's One Time Use of Racial Slur may be Very Expensive
It is not typical that a single racial epithet used by a supervisor toward a worker is enough to establish a hostile work environment under federal labor law; however, the (liberal) U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit recently disagreed. Read More ›
Categories: Harassment, News & Events
Unions Win The Most Elections in American History
In what will seem to be a shock to anybody reading this blog, because it is, unions won 72 percent of every National Labor Relations Board election held against a non-union employer in 2016. This is the highest rate in history. In fact, in bargaining units with a smaller number of employees, i.e. employees less than 50 in number, the unions won 74 percent of all their elections. While unions have won more than 60 percent of all NLRB elections in the last 12 years, this is a real stunner. Read More ›
Categories: Union
Union Retirees Cut Their Own Pension to Forestall Doomsday Scenario
In the first of its kind, members of an international construction union voted to make drastic cuts in their already earned pensions. Members of Local Ironworkers 17 in Cleveland, Ohio approved serious cuts in January of this year to their pension plan. It was the first time ever the employees of a multi-employer pension fund had ever conducted such a vote, let alone voted to cut their own benefits. There are over 2,000 plan participants and while less than half actually voted, two-thirds of the votes did vote in favor of the cuts. Read More ›
MIOSHA Safety Violations Are Not a Joke Anymore!
Many business people in the State of Michigan (which is a “state plan vs. federal plan state”) routinely consider a citation from MIOSHA to be a mere nuisance and no more intimidating than a slap on a wrist or a parking ticket. Nothing could be further from the truth. We have had companies cited for workplace fatalities where the Presidents of the companies were actually tried on manslaughter charges. There will be an increased federal push to go after corporate executives in serious workplace fatality injury cases from now on. Being cited for a willful or repeated violation is not at all uncommon. There is a very low standard for being charged with “willful”, i.e. you merely had to know that what you were doing was probably wrong to be charged with a willful violation. Currently the minimum payment penalty for a willful violation is $5,000. It will shortly jump to $8,908, almost a 53 percent increase. Similarly, the maximum penalty for a willful will jump from $70,000 per violation to $124,709 per violation. That should be enough to get any CEO or CFO’s attention. On top of that, it is not unusual for MIOSHA to itemize citations or violations such that if there were three injuries caused by the same situation, they could be cited as three separate $124,000 violations. Read More ›
Categories: News & Events, OSHA and MIOSHA
Temporary injunction issued against Department of Labor overtime regulations
A Federal court in Texas issued a temporary injunction yesterday against the new Department of Labor (“DOL”) overtime regulations that were set to go into effect December 1st.
The injunction follows court arguments heard on November 16th in a lawsuit brought by 21 states alleging the new DOL’s rules exceeds the DOL’s authority and violated administrative law requirements. The new regulations propose to raise the salary threshold for exempt employees from $23,660 to $47,476 and provide for an automatic increase to the threshold every three years. Read More ›
Categories: Department of Labor, News & Events, Overtime, Regulations
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