As the debate over the employment status of Uber drivers continues, one employment benefit raises a set of questions not presented by the others: overtime pay. Uber has suggested that if it is forced to reclassify its drivers as employees, it will cap its driv... More »
On April 1, 2019, the U.S. DOL proposed a new interpretation of joint employer liability under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). DOL’s four-factor test focuses exclusively on whether an entity “actually exercises the power to” hire and fire, supervise and c... More »
Last spring, the California Supreme Court sent shockwaves through the gig economy with its ruling in Dynamex Operations West, Inc., in which it held that the so-called ABC test is the appropriate one for determining whether a worker is an independent contracto... More »
This January, undocumented dairy worker José Arias secured a million-dollar settlement in a Fair Labor Standards Act retaliation suit against the dairy’s lawyer. The settlement follows a 2017 ruling from the Ninth Circuit that extended the scope of retaliation... More »
On Thursday, Illinois state lawmakers passed a bill that will raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025. The $15 minimum wage was a campaign staple and top legislative priority for Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker, who announced in a statement t... More »
This week, United Teachers Los Angeles called their first strike in decades. While the parties are negotiating over wages and staffing, a central issue in the dispute is the much bigger question of underfunding of the public school system. Teachers are askin... More »
The federal government shutdown is precipitating a wave of lawsuits and talk of sick-outs and strikes. That should be no surprise when approximately 400,000 federal employees are being required to work without pay. Wait, “required.”? Talk of being “forced” or ... More »
Jobs don’t fall prey to higher minimum wages, according to researchers at U.C. Berkeley. Completing the first comprehensive empirical study of its kind, Sylvia Allegretto, Anna Godoey, Carl Nadler, and Michael Reich analyzed the impact of incremental wage incr... More »
A coalition of legal organizations in Boston, including Greater Boston Legal Services (“GBLS”), Justice at Work, the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau (“HLAB”), and Volunteer Lawyers Project, in collaboration with community groups in Boston, is bringing justice to vict... More »
Minimum wages are rising across the country. On Sunday, San Francisco’s minimum wage reached $15 an hour for all businesses, the highest rate of any major U.S. city. (Seattle’s $15 minimum in effect last year applies only to large businesses with 501 or more e... More »
In Chicago, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois ruled in favor of sandwich franchise Jimmy John’s, who argued that the company cannot be liable for the FLSA violations of its individual restaurants. Jimmy John’s may control mayonnai... More »
On Monday, a former Tesla employee testified before the NLRB that the company stopped him from union organizing in February of last year. Michael Sanchez was reportedly asked to leave by security guards after distributing pro-union flyers to co-workers outsid... More »
February 17th, 2019