As our regular readers know, Employment & Labor Insider is a non-partisan blog. But with the first Presidential debate coming on Monday night, I thought it would be helpful to look at the two major presidential candidates and their positions on issues of interest to employers.

The following comes from each of the candidates' websites, supplemented by some news stories, with a ...

Thanks to Law360 for alerting us to this!

Straight from the courthouse to you -- I haven't even read this yet, but here is a copy of the lawsuit, which was filed today in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas.

UPDATE (4:41 p.m. EDT): Here's another one, filed in the same court - this one is some trade groups and a slew of Chambers of Commerce in Texas!

  ...

Employers, when was the last time you had a real makeover? Let's do one now!

The new white-collar exemptions under the Fair Labor Standards Act will go into effect December 1, but it's a good idea for employers to prepare now because there are a lot of changes that will have to be made, communicated, and taught to employees before then.

The salary threshold for most white-collar ...

Hot dawg! Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete has been named by Vault.com as the best law firm in the country for women lawyers and the best law firm in the country for minority lawyers. Heather Owen has the whole wonderful story at FOCUS, our women's leadership blog. This latest honor comes on the heels of our having been named by the National Law Journal as fourth best law firm for ...

Massachusetts has had a "comparable worth" law forever, but Gov. Charlie Baker just signed some amendments that will make it easier for women (and men) to assert pay equity claims. In addition to making it easier for plaintiffs to prove that two jobs are "substantially similar," the law prohibits asking for salary history before a conditional offer of employment has been made ...

My first job out of college was as a non-exempt clerical, and I wasn't a very "good fit." The work aside, I chafed at the rigid rules about start times-stop times-breaks-lunch hours-quitting times. If there was some work that I wanted to finish up and it was "lunch time," I couldn't take the extra 15 minutes needed to get it done. I had to stop right then and there, and go to lunch, or at least ...

"Do this, don't do that, can't you read the rules . . ."*

Of course, the mega-topic this week was the U.S. Department of Labor's Final Rule on white-collar exemptions to the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Ellen Kearns, co-chair of our Wage and Hour Practice Group, wrote a great Client Bulletin on the Rule, taking a complex subject and explaining it in a pithy and ...

BREAKING NEWS:  CALIFORNIA FALLS INTO THE SEA!

Well, not exactly.  But some natural phenomena occur only once or twice in a lifetime—like Halley’s Comet, or the turn of the Millennium, or the Mets winning the pennant.  Another one happened today:  the FLSA has become more protective or workers than California law, which is ordinarily the nation’s statistical outlier in the ...

Vice President Joe Biden is expected to announce the official release of the U.S. Department of Labor's new overtime rule this afternoon in an appearance at Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream in Columbus, Ohio. I'll post the rule, which will change the white-collar overtime exemptions to the Fair Labor Standards Act, as soon as it's available. Meanwhile, the DOL has already released the ...

I won't make this too painful - after all, it's Friday, and on top of that, the Final Rule on white-collar overtime exemptions under the Fair Labor Standards Act is due imminently. That will be painful enough.

This quiz concerns wage payment, which is normally governed by state law, not the FLSA. Wage payment laws generally require that employees receive "all wages when due," and the laws ...