This Employment Law This Week® Monthly Rundown discusses the most important developments for employers in August 2019.
This episode includes:
Our colleague Stuart M. Gerson at Epstein Becker Green recently posted an article on LinkedIn that will be of interest to our readers: “SCOTUS Today: Class Action Ambiguity Finds No Shelter Under the Federal Arbitration Act.”
Following is an excerpt:
In a 5-4 opinion (divided on expected conservative/liberal lines), authored by the Chief
The U. S. Supreme Court established limitations on personal jurisdiction over non-resident corporate defendants in state court “mass” actions in Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court of California, San Francisco Cty., 137 S. Ct 1773 (June 17, 2017) (hereafter “BMS”). BMS’s key holding was that the necessary nexus between an appropriate court for a
For more than 70 years, the Supreme Court has construed exemptions to the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) narrowly. In A.H. Phillips, Inc. v. Walling, for example, the Court stated that “[t]o extend an exemption to other than those plainly and unmistakably within its terms and spirit is to abuse the interpretative process and
Featured on Employment Law This Week: The U.S. Supreme Court takes on class action waivers.
In 2012, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that class action waivers in arbitration agreements violate employees’ rights under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second, Fifth, and Eighth Circuits disagreed,
On January 13, 2017, the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari to hear three cases involving the enforceability of arbitration agreements that contain class action waivers.
Whether such agreements are enforceable has been a hotly contested issue for several years now, particularly in cases involving wage-hour disputes.
The Fifth Circuit has held that such waivers
Our colleague Stuart M. Gerson at Epstein Becker Green wrote a new blog post that discusses the Supreme Court’s recent Dart decision: “Supreme Court Lowers the Bar for Class Action Removal.”
Following is an excerpt:
On December 15, 2014, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Dart Cherokee Basin Operating Co. v.
Michael Kun, co-founder of this blog and Member of Epstein Becker Green, was recently quoted in Inside Counsel about the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Wal-Mart v. Dukes decision upon wage-hour class actions.
The article, “Citing Dukes, Court Overturns Class Certification in Wage and Hour Dispute,” focuses on the Ninth Circuit’s
Earlier this month, in Urnikis-Negro v. American Family Property Services, 616 F.3d 665 (7th Cir. 2010), Ms. Urnikis-Negro, a former clerical employee at a real estate appraisal firm, sought relief from the U.S. Supreme Court and requested that it clarify the “fluctuating workweek” method that employers can use in calculating overtime. Before the trial court, Ms. Urnikis-Negro contended that although she routinely worked more than 40 hours a week, she never received any overtime pay. American Family Property Services argued that she was exempt for overtime as an administrative employee. While the trial court rejected the employer’s exemption classification, it concluded that it could pay her overtime based on the Department of Labor’s (“DOL”) “fluctuating workweek” method.
Continue Reading Supreme Court May Weigh in on When Employers Can Take Advantage of the “Fluctuating Workweek” Method for Calculating Overtime