“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Ferris Bueller was on to something there. In just the past seven days, we had the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals deny a request to have the entire court decide whether…
The Employer Handbook Blog
Why might OSHA’s vax-or-test mandate be legal after all? And what should employers be doing about it?
ICYMI, on Friday evening, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals dissolved the stay of OSHA’s vax-or-test Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS). You can read a copy of the full opinion here. Let’s start with the second question in the title of this blog post. What should employers do now that the ETS is…
Why is the employment lawyer blogging late on a Friday night? (Hint: ⚖️💉🤯)
I’ll get to my dessert in a bit. And, no, that’s not why I’m blogging tonight. It’s because I love my readers — again, not the alcohol talking — and I thought you should know that the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has — get this — DISSOLVED the stay…
And just like that, the CMS vaccine mandate is back on in 26 states. Ok, 25 states. Maybe.
On Wednesday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals — the same federal appellate court that stayed OSHA’s vaccine-or-test Emergency Temporary Standard — breathed new life into another federal vaccine mandate. I’m talking about the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services healthcare COVID-19 vaccine mandate (the “CMS Rule”). A few weeks…
One of the Sixth Circuit judges couldn’t resist sharing his two cents on OSHA’s vax-or-test mandate
As the business community patiently awaits a ruling from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals on whether the Fifth Circuit correctly stayed the OSHA Emergency Temporary Standard, we did get a significant Sixth Circuit ruling yesterday. The court confirmed that the entire court will not yet decide whether the ETS is…
On a scale of 😴 to 🤯, let’s score the EEOC’s latest guidance on whether COVID-19 is a disability
I was skeptical. Yesterday, at 10:17 AM, I received an emailed press release from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The federal agency touted “adding a new section [to its existing COVID-19 Technical Guidance] to clarify under what circumstances COVID-19 may be considered a disability under the Americans with Disabilities…
Waitress receives $4400 in tips but gets FIRED after she resisted sharing them. Is that legal?
It depends. ‘¯\_(ツ)_/¯’ What happened? According to the British Tabloids, several people dining together contributed $100 each following dinner at a restaurant for the two waitresses who served the group. The tips totaled $4,400. Apparently, one of the diners envisioned having a “$100 club” during the pandemic and called the…
PSA: Hire a lawyer to draft your employment agreements. Otherwise, you may end up like this.
And by “this,” I mean spending a lot more on lawyers to defend a breach of contract claim from a former employee who claims that the employment agreement she signed promised a guaranteed year of employment. But you be the judge. Here’s what a poorly drafted sentence of the contract…
Don’t discriminate. (But, if you do, don’t make it THIS EASY for the EEOC to nail you for it.)
I have a lot of respect for human resource professionals. It’s not easy being in HR. Or so I hear. (No one has ever confused me with someone who put the “human” in human resources. I can be more of a, shall we say, jerk.) I know the types of…
Is it legal to fire over 900 employees at once over Zoom?
Image by Lynn Kurtz from Pixabay News of a New York-based online mortgage lender’s CEO terminating over 900 employees with no notice on a three-minute Zoom call has been dominating my Google Alerts recently. There’s this NBCnews.com report from Elisha Fieldstadt, Ali Gostanian, and Bianca Britton. Noah Kirsch also reported…