Management Update

Volume 8, Issue 6

June 2019

Employers Should Prepare to Submit Their Component 2 Pay Data By September 30, 2019

On April 25, 2019, a U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that employers who are required to file EEO-1 reports must submit Component 2 pay data for calendar years 2017 and 2018 by September 30, 2019. (This generally applies to EEO-1 filers with 100 or more employees; both in the private industry and federal contractors and subcontractors.) You may recall that the OMB initially approved pay data collection, and then stayed its permission, in 2017. Advocacy groups filed suit in the D.C. Circuit court to vacate the OMB’s self-imposed stay, which the Court granted in April.

The EEOC will begin collecting employer’s pay data for 2017 and 2019 beginning in mid-July 2019. Filers should continue to use the EEOC’s online portal to report Component 1 data of the EEO-1 reports, which is due by May 31, 2019 unless the employer has received an extension. To read the full article, click here.

Dallas Follows Austin and San Antonio and Implements a Paid Sick Leave Ordinance

For those of you with employees in Dallas, Texas, this bit of news is for you. Last month Dallas passed an ordinance requiring private employers with employees who perform at least 80 hours of work in a year in Dallas to provide paid sick leave to their workers. The new ordinance goes into effect August 1, 2019 for employers with more than five employees. The ordinance will impact employers of five or fewer employees on August 1, 2021. Dallas joins Austin and San Antonio in implementing paid sick leave ordinances in Texas.

The new Dallas ordinance, Dallas Ordinance No. 31181, will require employers to provide one hour of earned paid sick time to their Dallas employees for every 30 hours of time worked. To read the full article, click here.

U.S. House of Representatives Urges OSHA to Create a Standard Regarding Workplace Violence in the Healthcare Industry

You may recall from our prior updates that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has been concerned with the prevalence of injuries suffered by healthcare and social service employees due to work-related violence for some time. Lacking a specific standard applicable to this risk, OSHA has generally relied on the General Duty Clause to induce employers to address this issue. However, in 2015 OSHA issued an updated voluntary guideline for violence prevention in healthcare and social services ( https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/risk-management/Documents/osha3148.pdf ) and in 2016 OSHA proposed a specific Standard covering violence in the healthcare and social service sectors. Unfortunately, the proposed Standard has languished and there has been little progress in moving it towards completion in the past three years.

Apparently dissatisfied with OSHA’s slow progress in developing its own Standard, Representative Joe Courtney (D. Ct.) recently filed H.R. 1309 “Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Services Act.” This bill requires the Department of Labor to address workplace violence in the healthcare and social service sectors. Specifically, the DOL must promulgate an occupational safety and health standard that requires certain employers in the healthcare and social service sectors, as well as employers in sectors that conduct activities similar to the activities in the healthcare and social service sectors, to develop and implement a comprehensive plan for protecting healthcare workers, social service workers, and other personnel from workplace violence. To read the full article, click here.

Be Careful if You Want to Use Unpaid Interns this Summer

Summer is upon us. The time of year that many of us are pressured to take on an employee’s son, daughter, niece or nephew “just for the experience” of working in the real world. What could go wrong? The kid gets some experience and you get some free labor. A win-win, right? You might want to slow down.

Many businesses run afoul of federal law by failing to pay minimum wage and overtime pay to unpaid interns whom the law considers to actually be employees. Federal courts have historically used the “primary beneficiary test” to determine whether an unpaid Summer worker was an employee under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Under this test, courts examine the economic realities of the worker-employer relationship to determine which party is the primary beneficiary of the relationship. If the unpaid worker is not the primary beneficiary, they should probably be classified as an employee. To read the full article, click here.