Good news for New Jersey employers who use independent contractors! Happily, the Superior Court of New Jersey Appellate Division [in Garden State Fireworks Inc. v. NJ Dept. of Labor, A-1581-15T2 (N.J. App. Div. September 29, 2017] recently decided that a pyrotechnics company's legal relationship with its independent contractor pyrotechnicians satisfied all three parts of the "ABC test" as laid out in New Jersey's definition of independent contractor status for unemployment insurance purposes.

What makes this New Jersey decision fascinating to me [as an attorney who frequently represents Illinois companies in their independent contractor legal battles with the Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES)] is the exceedingly sensible way by which the Superior Court of New Jersey Appellate Division interpreted the ABC test. They used common sense!

The highly questionable activities of Harvey Weinstein and others have caused the City Council of the City of Chicago to make significant changes to its laws in an effort to reduce sexual harassment. As a result of a recent survey of numerous hotels in the Chicagoland Area, which asserts that more than half of the women surveyed were allegedly sexually harassed or assaulted on their job, the Chicago City Council passed an Ordinance with the intent of protecting Hotel Workers.

The new Ordinance, which is a modification of the Municipal Code of the City of Chicago, has two primary components, both of which will require Chicago Hotels to take quick actions.

Employers who averaged 100 or more employees over the 2014 calendar year may be receiving a notice from the IRS in the coming months relating to potential penalties for failure to offer affordable coverage to full time employees for the 2015 calendar year, in violation of the ACA's Employer Shared Responsibility Mandate. In brief, employers who met the 100-employee threshold in 2014 were required to do the following in 2015:

Sample notices are available online. If you receive anything resembling the notice, you should contact legal counsel as soon as possible - according to the IRS, the deadline to respond to and, potentially, dispute amounts owed under the notices "generally will be 30 days from the date of [the notice]," leaving employers with little time to prepare a defense.