Hunton Employment & Labor Perspectives

On Tuesday, the United States Supreme Court held that the whistleblower protections that apply to employees of publicly traded companies under Section 1514A of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, also  extend to employees of private contractors and subcontractors that serve those public companies.

The Department of Labor’s Veterans’ Employment Training Service recently issued a proposed Rule that would change the current annual VETS-100 and VETS-100A reporting requirements.  There are several significant changes proposed by the DOL which, in a change from other regulatory developments, would actually decrease work for covered employers.

Workers at the Volkswagen AG plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted against union representation by the United Auto Workers. The highly anticipated 3-day secret-ballot election, supervised by the National Labor Relations Board, resulted in a 712 to 626 loss for the UAW. This particular election was significant in that a result for representation would have given unions a strategic entry point into the Southern labor market, which has long been resistant to unionization efforts. Additionally, a result for representation would have allowed for the first ever implementation of a German “works council” model for a United States employer. Under German law, a “works council” is a group of elected white-collar and blue-collar council members, separate from a union, that meets with management to discuss a wide variety of working condition issues. This model at the Volkswagen plant may have permitted the experimentation of a more collaborative system between management and workforce, as compared to the fundamentally adversarial relationship between management and traditional labor unions.

Earlier this month, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission released its fiscal year 2013 enforcement and litigation statistical report.  Each year, the EEOC publishes a comprehensive set of data tables which contain statistics on topics such as numbers of charges filed, types of charges filed, litigation and resolution numbers, and a myriad of other tables that provide insight into the agency’s actions over the 12-month period.

Under Section 203(o) of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”), an employee’s time spent “changing clothes” at the beginning or end of each workday is not compensable if such time is expressly excluded from compensable work time in a bona fide collective bargaining agreement or if there is a “custom or practice” of non-payment for such activities (or payment for a set amount of time).  On Monday, the Supreme Court clarified the definition of “changing clothes” for purposes of the FLSA, holding that a class of 800 unionized steelworkers, whose employment was covered by a collective bargaining agreement, were not entitled to compensation for time spent changing into and out of protective gear.

The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) performs compliance audits reviewing numerous federal contractors’ affirmative action plans and practices on a yearly basis.  A number of organizations are reporting that the OFCCP will be sending out courtesy letters (known as corporate scheduling announcement letters, or “CSAL”) notifying employers that they have been selected for such an audit as early as next week.  With the changing landscape of the OFCCP’s affirmative action plan requirements and regulations, it is important that employers be on the lookout for such letters and begin preparations for the audit as soon as possible.

On November 4, the state of Texas sued the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Jacqueline A. Berrien (in her official capacity as chair of the EEOC), requesting a federal district court to declare invalid the EEOC’s enforcement guidance on employers’ use of arrest and conviction records and to enjoin the EEOC from using this guidance against the state and its agencies. Texas v. EEOC, No. 5:13-cv-00255-C (N.D. Tex.).

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Even before passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), group health plan sponsors and administrators faced a significant array of notice and disclosure obligations.  Those obligations have only increased with passage of the ACA, and in many cases existing disclosure requirements have been revised.  For this reason, we are providing a table summarizing the principal notice and disclosure obligations currently applicable to group health plans, including those required under the ACA.  The first part of the table summarizes disclosure rules applicable to all welfare benefit plans ...

While much attention has been paid this year to the EEOC’s agenda and litigation over criminal background checks (the agency asserts such background checks have a disparate impact on minority groups), a parallel challenge kept pace in the form of private class action litigation under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”). 2013 saw a number of significant class action settlements against both employers and consumer reporting agencies (“CRAs”) for alleged violations of the Act in the use of criminal background checks:

On Monday, January 6, 2014, the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) announced that it declined to seek U.S. Supreme Court review of two adverse rulings concerning its rule requiring employers to display posters informing employees of their right to unionize.  Under the rule, an employer’s failure to display the poster would have constituted an unfair labor practice.