Keeping our clients and friends up to date on recent developments, we have released our Summer Newsletter. The Pappas Wright Summer Newsletter contains articles and materials about recent presentations and developments. As COVID-19 has been in the limelight, we provide Allison Wright’s presentation and handouts for the first part of Black Hawk College’s Business Training Center and Great River Human Resources program. The second part of Allison’s presentation is rescheduled for this Wednesday June 17, 2020 at 10:00 AM-11:30 AM.
We also have provided an article about new developments in Illinois Workers Compensation related to COVID-19.
Today the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal law protects gay and transgender workers from job discrimination in a decision that gives millions of LGBT people in dozens of states civil rights they had sought for decades. We provide an article on the on the Bostock v. Clayton County where Judge Gorsuch stated the Court does not “hesitate to recognize today a necessary consequence of that legislative choice: An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.”
We also have an article regarding the expansion of the US Department of Labor’s rules concerning the fluctuating work week. The United States Department of Labor (the “DOL”) issued a new final rule providing employers greater flexibility to use the fluctuating workweek method of calculating overtime pay for salaried, nonexempt workers whose hours vary from week to week. With this method, an employee who is entitled to overtime pay receives a fixed weekly salary, which is divided by the number of hours the employee actually worked in the week to determine the week’s base hourly rate. The employee will then receive an additional 0.5 times their base rate for each hour worked beyond 40 in the workweek. Prior to the new rule, there was confusion surrounding whether employers could use this method to calculate overtime pay for employees who receive bonuses and other incentive-based pay.
Our last article addresses Illinois Department of Human Rights’ release of a model training to meet the state law requirements. In 2019, the Illinois legislature passed the Workplace Transparency Act (the “WTA”), which amended portions of the Illinois Human Rights Act (the “IHRA”) and created a new requirement for employers with employees in Illinois to implement annual sexual harassment prevention training. This requirement extends to any employer who employs at least one employee in Illinois, regardless of whether the employer is based in Illinois. The WTA became effective on January 1, 2020 and requires that all Illinois employers facilitate a sexual harassment prevention training for all of their employees by December 31, 2020. Illinois employers must continue to facilitate sexual harassment prevention training on an annual basis thereafter.
More to come in the ever-changing world of employment law.