Wage and Hour Defense Blog

By David Jacobs and Amy B. Messigian

We would like to call your attention to a significant change to the whistleblower statute in California that went into effect on January 1. The statute, Cal. Lab. Code section 1102.5, has been substantially expanded beyond its prior form to now protect employees from retaliation for making internal complaints or even potential complaints about suspected violations of federal, state or local law.

California previously protected employees from retaliation for reporting reasonably suspected violations of state or federal laws to a ...

The Ninth Circuit has asked the California Supreme Court to clarify California's "suitable seating" law requiring certain employers to "provide" "suitable seating" to some employees where "the nature of the work reasonably permits the use of seats." The Ninth Circuit has asked whether the term "nature of the work" refers to individual tasks or a full range of duties, whether an employer's business judgment should be considered in determining if the nature of the work "reasonably permits" the use of a seat, and whether the employee must prove what would constitute a "suitable seat" to prevail.

Training Paid FLSA

"Wage Hour" "Affordable Care Act" "Minimum Wage"

By Alka N. Ramchandani & Michael D. Thompson

In recent years, Cal-OSHA has taken an aggressive stance against exposing employees to potential heat illness, often citing employers and proposing significant penalties for failing to provide to employees who work in high heat conditions with adequate drinking water, shade, training, and/or cool-down periods. Furthermore, as noted by the California Supreme Court in Brinker v. Superior Court, monetary remedies for the denial of meal and rest breaks “engendered a wave of wage and hour class action litigation” when added to the ...

by Michael Kun

We heard you loud and clear.  You’d like our EBG wage-hour app, currently available for use on Apple products, to be available on Android devices, too.

Consider it done.  Or, more accurately, almost done.

The Android version of the EBG wage-hour app will be available for download in early 2014.

And, yes, it will be free.

Look for more details here.

In the meantime, if you do not have an Apple device, PDF versions of our federal and state wage-hour guides, as well as other materials, remain available on our webpage.

by Michael D. Thompson

New Jersey voters have approved a ballot question that will raise the state’s minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.25 an hour, and to provide for future increases based on changes in the consumer price index.

After Gov. Chris Christie vetoed the minimum wage increase earlier this year, both houses of the New Jersey Legislature approved a referendum on the issue.  Accordingly, voters were asked: 

Do you approve amending the State Constitution to set a State minimum wage rate of at least $8.25 per hour? The amendment also requires annual increases in that rate if there are ...

Our colleagues Kara Maciel and Jordan Schwartz, both of Epstein Becker Green, recently cowrote an article for PLC titled "Tipped Employees Under the FLSA."

Following is an excerpt:

Wage and hour lawsuits certainly are not new phenomena, but in recent years, service industry employees have increasingly made claims regarding tips and service charges. In particular, employers in states such as Massachusetts, New York and California have seen a surge in class actions involving compulsory tip pools and distributions of service charges to employees. Commonly targeted employers ...

By: Kara M. Maciel

The following is a selection from the Firm's October Take 5 Views You Can Use which discusses recent developments in wage hour law.

1. IRS Will Begin Taxing a Restaurant's Automatic Gratuities as Service Charges

Many restaurants include automatic gratuities on the checks of guests with large parties to ensure that servers get fair tips. This method allows the restaurant to calculate an amount into the total bill, but it takes away a customer's discretion in choosing whether and/or how much to tip the server. As a result of this removal of a customer's voluntary act, the ...

By William J. Milani, Dean L. Silverberg, Jeffrey M. Landes, Susan Gross Sholinsky, Anna A. Cohen, and Jennifer A. Goldman

The New York State Department of Labor (“DOL”) has adopted wage deduction regulations (“Final Regulations”) pertaining to the expanded categories of permissible wage deductions in the New York Labor Law, effective October 9, 2013. 

As we previously reported (see the Act Now Advisory entitled “New York State Releases Proposed Wage Deduction Regulations”), among other things, the Final Regulations (i) set forth information concerning the subset ...