Can an outside attorney defending an employer in a lawsuit under the Fair Labor Standards Act be liable for retaliation against the plaintiff-employee based on litigation tactics? One court answered that question "yes" last week.

Are these judges crazy? You decide.

In Arias v. Raimondo, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed dismissal of ...

The U.S. Department of Labor submitted its brief today in Nevada v. U.S. Department of Labor, the case involving the challenge to the Obama Administration's overtime rule.

Some very quick background: The overtime rule, which would have more than doubled the salary threshold for administrative, executive, and some professional exemptions from the minimum wage and overtime ...

On November 23, 2016, we issued a Client Bulletin titled “Employers Can Breathe A Sigh of Relief Come December 1: Court strikes down overtime rule.”  But a new lawsuit in federal court in New Jersey puts a gulp in that sigh of relief.

Background

As previously reported, regulations that would have more than doubled the salary threshold for Administrative, Executive and ...

My law partner Heather Owen of our Jacksonville Office is back this week at FOCUS, our women's leadership blog, with the third and final part of her series on "How the FLSA hurts women." Her post this week provides specific examples of scenarios in which the relatively rigid requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act make work difficult for women who are trying to balance their ...

Last week, I wrote about a study describing how certain timekeeping systems could create wage and hour liability through, among other things, making it easy to "cheat" and providing no transparency when changes are made. (Which makes it impossible to detect and correct errors.) Having addressed the "problem" last week, I wanted to talk this week about solutions.

But before I do ...

ConstangyTV's Close-Up on Workplace Law, April edition, is out! Host Leigh Tyson interviews John MacDonald, head of our Princeton (NJ) Office, about employment law issues unique to the financial and investment industries. If you haven't already subscribed to our monthly video series, please do so. And, to save you the trouble of trekking all that way over to YouTube, here is the video:

Does your timekeeping software make it harder for you to comply with wage and hour laws -- and to defend yourself in a wage and hour lawsuit?

A study recently published in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology says that there are features of certain timekeeping programs that can create wage and hour problems for employers, and result in underpayment* of employees.

*Underpayment ...

The FLSA hurts women? Heather Owen, partner in our Jacksonville Office and proprietor of FOCUS, our women's leadership blog, begins a three-part series on how the Fair Labor Standards Act, with its lack of flexibility, is unfair to women (non-exempt women, anyway), who continue to assume more responsibility for child care, elder care, and other domestic duties, in addition to their ...

Remember the Garbage Pail Kids from the '80s? I have had an inspiration that will make my fortune! I'm going to create a set of collectible "HR Horribles"™ trading cards, representing the employees who make Human Resources professionals' lives a living heck.

Here is my first set:

Randy Romeo. Romeo has never met a woman he didn't like, especially if she reports to him, because ...

Walter Olson of the great Overlawyered.com sent a challenge over Twitter earlier this week:

For those of you who don't know Mr. Olson, he's a libertarian.  :-)

I have to admit, I needed time to process this! I complain about these laws all the time, but would I really want to get rid of all protections for employees who want to organize, be paid a fair wage, avoid being thrown out on the street ...