Offering Practical Guidance to Employers
Beginning August 1, 2021, Louisiana employers will be required to provide reasonable accommodations to employees who need such accommodations due to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, unless it would pose an undue hardship on the employer. Read more about these developments from our Louisiana colleagues.
The Oregon legislature has temporarily amended Oregon’s Equal Pay Act to allow employers latitude to both encourage COVID-19 vaccinations and to attract new employees as the state emerges from COVID-19 business restrictions. Under the revised statute, when evaluating whether employees who perform work of comparable character are paid equitably, a comparison of employee compensation may exclude vaccine incentives. Similarly, hiring and retention bonuses are excluded from the calculation. The exclusion is only temporary, however, and scheduled to expire on March 1, 2022.
Read more on these developments.
As part of the Omnibus Jobs and Economic Growth Finance and Policy Bill, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has approved an amendment relating to pregnancy accommodations and barring reducing compensation for lactation breaks, among other changes. The amendment goes into effect on January 1, 2022.
Under Minnesota law, employers must provide employees who need to express breast milk for their infant child reasonable break times each day. The amendment prohibits an employer from reducing an employee’s compensation for time used for the purpose of expressing milk. The amendment also includes language that limits an employer’s obligation to the 12 months following the birth of the child. Employers may still ask that these lactation breaks be scheduled over regularly scheduled rest or meal breaks; but if not, they cannot dock pay.
Additionally, the amendment combined Minnesota’s laws related to nursing mothers, lactating employees, and pregnancy accommodations into one section, Minnesota Statute Section 181.939. The law on pregnancy accommodations remains largely the same; however, under the amendment, coverage applies to all employers with at least 15 employees (not at least 21) and there are no longer any length of time or average number of hours per week an employee must satisfy to qualify for the accommodation rights and protections under the statute.
If you have questions or need assistance, please reach out to a Jackson Lewis attorney.
The state and some local COVID-19 supplemental paid sick leave requirements continue through the summer. And the City of Los Angeles’ mayor issued a public order mandating additional paid leave. Under the order, employees who work within the City of Los Angeles and have been employed by their employer for 60 days are entitled to paid time off to get vaccinated for COVID-19, including traveling to and from the appointment, as well as recovering from the side effects of vaccination, if it prevents the employee from being able to work or telework. Read more about the order here.
The Virginia Office of Civil Rights has issued its new poster for employers regarding reasonable accommodations for employees with disabilities. Starting July 1, 2021, covered Virginia employers must post this poster in a conspicuous location and provide a copy of the poster to any employee who discloses they have a disability, within 10 days of that disclosure.
The poster clarifies that the law applies to employers with more than five employees for a 20-week period in the current or preceding year. The law takes effect July 1.
(For more details of the new requirements, see our article, Virginia Employers Soon Must Adopt, Provide Accommodation Policies to Employees With Disabilities.)
If you have any questions, contact the Jackson Lewis attorney with whom you regularly work.
When the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rolled out its COVID-19 Healthcare Emergency Temporary Standard on June 10, 2021, it also issued its updated Guidance on Mitigating and Preventing the Spread of COVID-19 in non-healthcare workplaces. Read more about this new guidance here.
Since 2019, private employers with at least 50 employees have been required in most instances, pursuant to NRS 608.0197, to provide 0.01923 hours of paid leave to their employees for each hour worked. Now, Nevada has enacted new law requiring employers to provide additional paid leave to allow employees to receive a COVID-19 vaccination and clarifying that employees may use existing paid leave to care for themselves and their family members. Read more from our Nevada colleagues about these new employer obligations.
Starting on July 1, 2021, most Virginia employers must include information in their employee handbooks about reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities and provide that information directly to any employee within 10 days after receiving notice that the employee has a disability. Read more about this new requirement.
Governor Ned Lamont has signed into law a requirement for employers to provide all employees with two hours unpaid time off to vote. Employers may have missed this development, as it was just one small section within the state’s 800-page budget. The key provisions are:
Maine employees will soon be eligible to take protected unpaid leave to care for serious health conditions of their grandchildren. On June 14, 2021, Governor Janet Mills signed into law L.D. 61, an Act to Include Grandparents Under Maine’s Family Medical Leave Laws. The law amends the Maine Family Medical Leave Act to allow an employee to take unpaid leave to care for a grandchild or a domestic partner’s grandchild. Previously, the law limited leave to care for another individual’s serious health condition to children, domestic partners’ children, parents, domestic partners, siblings, or spouses.
Maine’s FMLA requires employers in Maine who employ 15 or more employees at one location in Maine to provide employees 10 weeks of unpaid FMLA leave over a two-year period. To qualify, an employee must have been employed by the employer for over one year. Employees may use this leave for the birth of a child or adoption of a child 16 or younger; the employee’s own serious health condition; caring for the serious health condition of their children, grandchildren, domestic partner’s grandchildren, domestic partner’s children, parents, domestic partners, siblings, or spouses; donation of an organ for human transplant; or death or serious health condition of the employee’s spouse, domestic partner, parent, sibling, or child if the death or serious health condition occurs while on active duty in the U.S. military or state armed forces.
Upon the end of this leave, employees are entitled to be restored to the position they had when the leave commenced or to a position with equivalent seniority status, benefits, pay, and other terms and conditions of employment. Employers are required to allow an employee to continue his or her benefits during the leave period at the employee’s own expense.
The expansion of the covered reasons for leave to include the serious health condition of a grandchild will go into effect 90 days after the end of the Maine Legislature’s present session.
