Hunton Employment & Labor Perspectives

HuntonAK Labor and Employment partner Emily Burkhardt Vicente has been selected as part of the Los Angeles Business Journal’s inaugural “Thriving in Their 40s” award.

The award recognizes outstanding market leaders and professionals in Los Angeles in their 40s. Emily was selected based on her contributions to the firm and profession.

Emily’s profile can be seen online at LABJ.

Read the Firm press release for additional information.

Congratulations!

On December 16, 2020, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) updated its COVID-19 guidance with a new section pertaining to vaccinations.

The updated release—“What You Should Know About COVID-19 and the ADA, the Rehabilitation Act, and Other EEO Laws”—discusses how employers who require vaccinations should respond to an employee who is unable or unwilling to receive a COVID-19 vaccination because of a disability or sincerely held religious belief.

Hunton labor and employment attorneys Ryan Bates, Ryan Glasgow and Sharon Goodwyn have been recognized by their peers as members of Virginia Business magazine’s 2020 Legal Elite.

The annual recognition of Virginia’s Legal Elite is a project of Virginia Business magazine, in cooperation with the Virginia Bar Association. Approximately 7,000 lawyers across the state were asked by the magazine to nominate colleagues they considered “elite” in 20 categories, including labor and employment.

Please read the firm press release for a complete list of HuntonAK honorees.

Earlier this month, the EEOC launched EEOC Explore, “an interactive data query and mapping tool” that gives users access to aggregate data on more than 73,000 employers and 56 million employees across the United States.  According to the agency, EEOC Explore “enables stakeholders to explore and compare data trends across a number of categories, including location, sex, race and ethnicity, and industry sector without the need for experience in computer programming or statistical analysis.”

Five HuntonAK Labor and Employment partners were recognized in the most recent publication of the Lawdragon 500 Leading U.S. Corporate Employment Lawyers.

• Juan Enjamio
• Kurt Powell
• Emily Burkhardt Vicente
• Kevin White
• Holly Williamson

The Lawdragon guide represents the nation’s top talent “defending wage and hour, discrimination and a host of other claims…and handling union and other labor-management relation matters.”

California is well known for its broad restrictions relating to non-competition clauses applicable to workers. After a recent decision by the Federal Circuit, such notoriety may extend to the patent realm. Employers should beware to not fall into this employment agreement trap.

In what it characterized as an issue not previously addressed by California’s appellate courts, in Whitewater West Industries v. Alleshouse, No. 2019-1852 (Fed. Cir. Nov. 19, 2020), the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that that California state law not only restricts non-competition ...

The Federal Reserve anticipates an approximate two percent reduction in unemployment by June 2021, envisioning rapid mass-hiring by employers once governments lift the more stifling COVID-19 restrictions.  Businesses requiring pre-employment background checks may be uniquely exposed to liability under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”) if minor mistakes are amplified by mass-hiring events.

Given the pervasiveness of social media in society, the National Labor Relations Board (Board) has been forced to frequently weigh in on the intersection between employee and employer’s social media activity and labor law. The Board has released a great catalog of cases over the past decade touching on issues related to the workplace and social media—these issues range from what social media policies and employer may enact to what discipline an employer may impose for an employee’s social media conduct.

An Alabama federal judge granted AutoZone's request to dismiss nearly 500 current and former store managers from a nationwide collective action that the national auto-parts chain had misclassified them as exempt under the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) and denied them overtime, holding those plaintiffs had missed the three-year statute of limitations and that plaintiffs had failed to establish equitable tolling should apply to save their claims.

California employers now have some guidance from the state in implementing the new “Emergency COVID-19 Prevention Regulations” (“CA ETS”) that went into effect on November 30.

Employers were given no lead-time to comply with these stringent new rules by the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board (“Cal/OSHA”).  The CA ETS does contain obligations that employers already have in place, which are largely consistent with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”) guidance. But, as explained in an earlier update, the regulations also include significant onerous new obligations.  Faced with the threat of civil penalties, employers will now need to implement costly new prevention measures at a time when the pandemic is already putting a huge strain on the economy and businesses in particular. These new measures may ultimately put some employers out of business.