New York State Assembly Bill A8092B, referred to as New York State’s Lawful Absence Law, recently went into effect.[1] The Law, which amends New York Labor Law §215, prohibits employers from threatening, penalizing, discriminating, or retaliating against employees for any lawful absences under federal, state, or local law, including legally...
By Jill Kahn Marshall and Anna Beckelman As an employment lawyer, I often find myself having the same difficult conversation with prospective clients who believe they were wrongfully discharged. I explain that while the circumstances of the termination may seem unfair, if the worker was an at-will employee (like most...
Last year, I wrote about a case challenging New York’s reproductive healthcare nondiscrimination bill on First Amendment freedom of speech grounds. Now, in a related case, the Second Circuit recently held that the law may violate the right to freedom of “expressive association” for certain anti-abortion employers. The law in...
By Jill Kahn Marshall and Bilal Mubarack Last week, the National Labor Relations Board made headlines when it ruled, in McLaren Macomb, 372 NLRB No. 58 (February 21, 2023), that it was an unlawful labor practice for a hospital to offer a severance agreement to several furloughed workers which contained...
On January 23, 2023, in Syeed v. Bloomberg L.P., the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit addressed a discrete but interesting issue concerning application of the New York City Human Rights Law and the New York State Human Rights Law (together, the “HRLs”).[1] The HRLs prohibit, among...
A bearish economic outlook has launched a wave of mass layoffs throughout the technology, financial services, and media industries. To name a few, Twitter, Google, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Disney —the giants of corporate America — are shedding employees at an alarming rate. While the reasoning behind such large-scale reductions...
In New York State, employers are required to adopt a sexual harassment prevention policy, which includes a complaint form, and to provide the policy to each employee. To aid employers in fulfilling this obligation, a few years ago the state published a model sexual harassment prevention policy that employers may...
By Jill Kahn Marshall and Alice Jump On January 5, 2023, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it was proposing a rule to ban noncompete clauses from all employee contracts throughout the country. These noncompetes, FTC Commissioner Lina Khan argued, “block workers from freely switching jobs, depriving them of...
With the holidays in tow and the year nearing its end, many employees may find themselves checking in on how much vacation time or paid time off (PTO) they have left to use or, depending on company policy, carry over to next year. But what if an employee resigns or...
Twitter is recently undergoing some “extremely hardcore” workplace turmoil, shall we say, and doing so very publicly before the eyes of millions and millions of Twitter users around the world. When I first saw reference to the now well-known email ultimatum set down by Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner and...