By: Casey Cosentino
There is an on-going trend by the U.S. Department of Labor (“DOL”) to leverage popular technology to increase public and consumer awareness of the laws and regulations it enforces. Indeed, the DOL is continually exploring creative ways to share information with the public using the fastest and most-wide reaching means available. Through technology, the DOL is intentionally providing employees and consumers with enforcement data about companies, particularly hotels and restaurants, so that they can make informed employment and patronage ...
OSHA’s recent string of hotel inspections in response to formal safety and health complaints filed by UNITE-HERE and others on behalf of hotel housekeepers is under serious scrutiny from the House of Representatives Subcommittee that oversees OSHA’s operations. OSHA leadership is defending its decision to inspect hotels, and is signaling that OSHA will not shy away from inspecting employers in the midst of organizing campaigns and/or contentious bargaining over labor agreements.
Over the last year, OSHA received a number of formal, written ...
by Michael S. Kun, Eric A. Cook, and Jennifer A. Goldman
California Governor Jerry Brown has signed two employment-related bills into law, raising the stakes for employers doing business in California. The two laws, which increase the penalties for employers that wrongly classify employees as independent contractors or engage in "wage theft," both go into effect on January 1, 2012.
Misclassification of Workers as Independent Contractors
The first of the new laws, SB 459, directly impacts employers that classify workers as independent contractors. Referred to by critics as the ...
Most employers are well versed in the FMLA requirements; however, I recently received a call from one of our hospitality clients seeking guidance on administering intermittent FMLA leave. Specifically, the hotel was seeking advice on how to manage a Housekeeping Department employee who was approved for intermittent FMLA leave and had recently increased the frequency of his days off with little or no notice of the need for leave.
Notably the FMLA and supporting regulations do not provide much guidance for employers. It is clear from the regulations ...
By: Kara M. Maciel
On August 25, 2011, the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) adopted a final rule to require all employers to post a notice of employee rights under the National Labor Relations Act (“NLRA”). The required posting provides information to employees about the right to organize a union, bargain collectively, and engage in protected concerted activity – as well as the right to refrain from such activity. Significantly, this posting requirement is required for all hospitality employers – large and small -- regardless of whether your operations are ...
by Michael Kun
Some were beginning to wonder whether it would ever happen. After more than two years, the California Supreme Court has announced a hearing date in the much-awaited Brinker v. Superior Court case -- November 8, 2011.
Unless the Court takes a detour, California employers should finally know the answer to a question that has long driven California's billion dollar wage-hour class action industry -- must an employer "ensure" that employers take meal and rest periods, or are they only required to make them "available" to employees.
Should the Supreme Court rule that ...
by Susan Gross Sholinsky , Dean L. Silverberg, Steven M. Swirsky, and Jennifer A. Goldman
New York City employers take note: under the New York City Human Rights Law (“NYCHRL”), it is now considerably more difficult for employers to establish “undue hardship” in the context of denying an employee’s request for a reasonable accommodation due to his or her religious observance or practice. While previously silent on the issue, the NYCHRL now includes a definition of the term “undue hardship,” as follows: “an accommodation requiring significant expense or ...
By: Kara M. Maciel and Mark M. Trapp
On August 23, 2011 the Washington D.C. area experienced a 5.9 magnitude earthquake. A week later, a “labor law earthquake” of far greater magnitude had its epicenter in a federal agency in D.C. In the coming weeks and months, its aftershocks will be felt by unprepared employers, particularly those operating hotels, restaurants, spas and clubs in the hospitality industry.
In an opinion that America’s largest private sector labor union called a“monumental victor[y] … for unions,” the National Labor Relations Board ...
Many of our hospitality clients are revisiting immigration requirements to see if there are any advantages that they have overlooked. One overlooked advantage is the USCIS’s E-Verify system. Employers know that the IRCA requires them to satisfy the Form I-9 requirements. Many have found this difficult to implement and have been the targets of worksite enforcement operations by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) that are costly to defend and often result in significant fines. Traditionally, many hospitality employers have looked at ...
Congratulations to our fellow EBG bloggers: LexisNexis has selected Epstein Becker Green's Wage & Hour Defense Blog as a nominee for its Top 25 Labor and Employment Law Blogs. LexisNexis annually honors a select group of blogs that set the online standard for a given industry. This year, LexisNexis expanded Top Blogs to the Labor and Employment Law Community.
To narrow down to its final list of 25 honorees, LexisNexis is seeking feedback and input from the online community. If you find Epstein Becker Green's Wage & Hour Defense Blog useful and informative, we would appreciate your ...
As you may know, the authors of this blog are attorneys at Epstein Becker Green, a national law firm with approximately 300 lawyers practicing in ten offices throughout the U.S.
On July 19, 2011, Epstein Becker Green’s Jay P. Krupin testified before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) concerning the Board’s dramatic rulemaking proposals to modify the representation election process. The firm was one of only a handful of management-side firms invited to provide testimony on behalf of clients at this first-ever NLRB hearing.
Vigorously arguing against the proposed ...
By Michael Kun
Understandably, employers have celebrated the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes and AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion. At the very least, those cases would seem to suggest that the wage-hour class actions and collective actions that have besieged employers might be curtailed significantly, along with the costly settlements triggered by the in terrorem effect of such lawsuits.
California employers can stop celebrating, or at least tone down those celebrations.
Unlike other states, California law provides for a mechanism by which employees ...
By Michael Kun and Betsy Johnson
In a much-anticipated decision, the California Supreme Court has expanded the scope of California’s complex wage-hour laws to non-resident employees who perform work in California. While the decision leaves more than a few questions unanswered, it will require a great many employers to review their overtime and other payroll practices. Perhaps just as importantly, it will likely open the door to lawsuits, including class actions, regarding prior overtime and payroll practices. This issue is of particular importance to hospitality ...
By: Kara M. Maciel and Casey Cosentino
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) continues its aggressive quest to challenge “inflexible” medical leave policies, as Denny’s Inc. agreed earlier this month to pay $1.3 million to settle a nationwide class action lawsuit. Denny’s also entered into an injunction barring its restaurants from future violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), including denying disabled employees reasonable medical leave and retaliating against employees for bringing disability discrimination claims.
The ...
By: Kara M. Maciel
The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division in Norfolk, Virginia has announced that it will be stepping up its compliance audits and enforcement efforts against area hotels. In the past few years, the DOL stated it found violations at about 60% of local hotels. According to the DOL, the agency recently made spot checks at 10 area hotels since April. This is just one part of the agency’s nationwide enforcement program and its “Plan/Prevent/Protect” initiative against the hospitality industry. Common violations assessed by the DOL include:
· ...
By: Kara Maciel and Adam Solander
Over a year after thePatient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”) was signed into law, the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) recently released much anticipated information on issues related to the calculations of full-time and full-time equivalent employees for determining when an employer may be subject to a penalty under PPACA. In Notice 2011-36 (“Notice”), the IRS is specifically seeking employer’s comments on several of the issues by June 17, 2011. For hospitality employers, who traditionally employ a large ...
By: Kara M. Maciel and Jordan Schwartz
On May 10, 2011, the Southern District of New York conditionally certified a collective action against eight New York metropolitan area restaurants owned by celebrity chef Mario Batali alleging violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act. In the action, restaurant servers argue that the Batali restaurants are paying employees less than minimum wage and unlawfully retaining a portion of their tips.
The primary allegation in the lawsuit is that the restaurants deduct from the employee tip pool a portion of all credit-card tips equal to ...
By: Douglas Weiner
In a recently reported case from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, Applebee’s servers and bartenders alleged they spent a “substantial” amount of time performing non-tipped work, such as cleaning and maintenance, and, therefore, should be paid the minimum wage of $7.25 for the time spent performing non-tipped work, rather than the direct wage of $2.13 the FLSA allows employers to pay employees in tipped occupations See 29 U.S.C. § 203(m) and 29 U.S.C. § 203(t).
Applebee’s argued it properly applied a tip credit to the servers and bartenders’ ...
By: Jay P. Krupin, Kara M. Maciel, Eric J. Conn
As we reported in our blog post in November of 2010, hotel housekeepers across the nation launched a concerted program of filing complaints with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) alleging a range of ergonomic and chemical exposure injuries sustained on the job. Government regulators and legislators are now taking action in response to these complaints. We have attached a series of articles discussing the nature of the complaints and the government’s response to them.
Specifically, the OSHA complaints ...
By: Michael Kun
Employers who do business in California are already well aware of the wage-hour class actions that have besieged employers in virtually every industry. Class claims for misclassification of employees as exempt employees or independent contractors first began to be filed more than a decade ago, and continue to be filed on a daily basis. Claims for alleged work off-the-clock and missed meal and rest periods by non-exempt employees generally began later, but continue to be filed at an alarming rate.
Now we can add to those cases a new wave of California class actions ...
On January 14, 2011, EpsteinBeckerGreen helped one of its restaurant clients, the Brasserie Ruhlmann, obtain summary judgment “in its entirety” in a lawsuit brought by former waiters, bussers, and runners (“Plaintiffs”). Similar to many such wage and hour cases currently being litigated in the hospitality industry, Plaintiffs sought to invalidate the restaurant’s tip pool with assertions that captains and the banquet coordinator performed managerial functions and, thus, were not “tip eligible.” If Plaintiffs had succeeded, they would have also ...
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Kasten v. Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corp., __ U.S. __ (March 22, 2011), holds that an employee’s oral complaint of a violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) constitutes protected conduct under the FLSA’s anti-retaliation provision.
EBG partner Frank C. Morris, Jr., discusses in an EBG Act Now Advisory the fact that the Kasten decision is merely the latest in an ever-growing series of cases where the Supreme Court has broadly interpreted protections against retaliation and for whistleblowers. The EBG Act Now ...
By: Kara M. Maciel
A Maryland federal court recently ruled in Gionfriddo v. Jason Zink LLC that the owner and operator of two taverns could not qualify as a “tipped employee” under the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) and the Maryland Wage and Hour Law despite that he also worked as a bartender at his establishments. Thus, while he contributed tips to the tip pool arrangement when he worked as a bartender, he could not also share in the distribution of the tips. The court stated that allowing an owner to participate in a tip pool would broaden the FLSA’s tip credit provisions to a ...
On February 15, 2011, the United States District Court for the Western District of New York denied a motion to dismiss a complaint by foreign H-2B workers that alleged that their employer violated the minimum wage provisiosn of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by refusing to reimburse the workers' transportation, visa and recruitment expenses. See Teoba v. Turgreen Landcare LLC, No. 10-6132 (W.D.N.Y. Feb. 15, 2011). In Teoba, the plaintiffs seek to represent a class of H-2B workers who were recruited over a three-year period by Trugreen, a landscape ...
By: Kara M. Maciel and Evan Rosen
In recent weeks the Obama Administration’s National Labor Relations Board (the “Board”) has been very active in soliciting public comments and amicus briefs on a wide range of decisions and proposed regulations that could drastically change the labor relations landscape. One of these topics are the rules surrounding the scope of union solicitation on a non-unionized employer’s private property.
We have received many inquiries from our clients about the Board's review of whether to change the solicitation rules. In light of the ...
In a recent article “Food Safety and Whistleblowing – New Federal Law May Deliver a Full Basket of Claims,” EBG partners Allen Roberts and John Houston Pope discuss the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (“FSMA”), which was signed into law on January 4, 2011.
This new federal law could have a significant impact on restaurateurs, clubs, and other hospitality employers who manufacture, distribute, transport, receive, hold or import food. FSMA opens wide a new door to whistleblower activity and protection, necessitating employer attention to related compliance ...
By: Kara M. Maciel
The United States District Court for the Northern District of California has denied certification of a class action against Joe's Crab Shack restaurants on claims that employees worked off-the-clock, were denied meal and rest breaks, and were required to purchase t-shirts to wear at work. Because the case was handled by our EpsteinBeckerGreen colleagues Michael Kun and Aaron Olsen, we do not believe it is appropriate to comment on the decision or its implications. If you would like to read the decision, a copy may be found here.
By: Amy Traub
Following up on our previous blog posting from November 2, 2010, on December 16, 2010, the New York State Department of Labor issued a new minimum wage order (the “Order”) which will bring immediate changes to the restaurant and hotel industries. Under the Order, employees will be due a higher minimum wage and subject to new tip pooling rules. Meanwhile, employers will need to comply with more stringent recordkeeping requirements. Although employers have until February 28, 2011, to adjust their payrolls, they will still owe their employees back pay as of ...
By: Kara M. Maciel and Forrest G. Read, IV
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit’s recent decision in Diaz v. Jaguar Rest. Group, LLC underscores the importance for hospitality employers to know which job duties their employees are performing in order to assert every potentially applicable affirmative defense when answering an employee’s FLSA lawsuit for non-payment of overtime. In Diaz, the Eleventh Circuit reversed the trial court’s decision that a restaurant, which failed to raise the administrative exemption to the overtime requirement at any point ...
By: Michael Casey, Peter Panken, and Steven Swirsky
The new Obama National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB” or the “Board”) has signaled that it will likely be granting union organizers the right to enter employers’ premises to conduct union organizing activity. This would reverse a trend in the last few years of preserving an employer's property rights, and of confining union organizers to areas outside of an employer's private premises, including those areas open to the public, in hotels, restaurants, clubs and other hospitality venues where non-employees ...
by Michael Kun and Doug Weiner
It is no secret that employers have been beseiged by wage-hour litigation, including wage-hour class actions and collective actions. These lawsuits have hit the hospitality industry as hard as any other industry, perhaps harder.
It is also no secret that the persons who benefit most from these actions are often plaintiffs' counsel, who frequently receive one-third or more of any recovery.
Now, as a result of an unprecedented new program initiated by the the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division ("WHD"), the WHD will be practically delivering ...
Please join me, Jay P. Krupin, Michael S. Kun and other attorneys from our firm, Epstein Becker Green, as we present a full-day program covering labor and employment law topics that have increasingly impacted hospitality employers over the past two years. In addition, we will offer an outlook of what we should expect in the coming two years.
Our keynote speaker is Darrel Thompson, Senior Advisor to Senate Majority Harry Reid, who will offer comments concerning the agenda of the 112th Congress. We are particularly pleased that Norah O'Donnell, MSNBC Chief Washington Correspondent, is ...
On December 6, 2010, the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco announced that the owners of the El Balazo restaurant chain in the Bay Area had been charged in a 20-count criminal Information with tax fraud and harboring illegal aliens. These charges arise out of a raid made by federal agents in May 2008 that resulted in the arrest of 64 illegal aliens at several of these restaurants. The Information charges the owners with conspiracy to commit tax evasion, tax evasion, harboring illegal aliens for financial gain, and submitting false Social Security ...
Missouri Man Convicted in Scheme to Place Undocumented Workers in Hotels
On October 28, 2010, a Missouri man was convicted by the U.S. District Court in Missouri for his role in a racketeering scheme that involved placing undocumented workers at hotels in 14 states, including several hotels in the Kansas City, Missouri, area. United States v. Dougherty, No. 4:09-CR-00143 (W.D. Mo. Oct. 10, 2010). Beth Phillips, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, indicated that “Mr. Kristin Dougherty was found guilty of racketeering, participating ...
By: Jay P. Krupin and Kara M. Maciel
Last week, on November 9, 2010, housekeepers employed by Hyatt Hotels filed complaints with OSHA alleging injuries sustained on the job. The complaints were filed in eight cities across the country, including Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Long Beach, San Antonio, Honolulu and Indianapolis. Similar OSHA actions may occur in Boston, NYC, DC, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Miami, and Orlando with higher concentrations of hotel properties. This is the first time that employees of a single private employer have filed multi-city OSHA complaints, and it ...
by Michael Kun and Aaron Olsen
In recent years, some plaintiffs' counsel bringing wage-hour claims have have made the strategic decision to bring "hybrid" class actions; that is, actions alleging both federal and state wage-hour claims. These cases can cause logistical nightmares for the courts, and great benefits for plaintiffs, for two primary reasons: (1) the standard for certification of a class is different for federal and state claims, and (2) classes in federal claims are "opt in" classes while those for state claims are "opt out" classes. Indeed, in bringing "hybrid" ...
On November 2, 2010, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a Report on the H-2B nonimmigrant program (Report). This Report examines fraud and abuse by examining 10 criminal prosecutions of recruiters and employers participating in the H-2B program. This program allows employers in the hospitality and other industries with a onetime occurrence, peak load, seasonal or intermittent employment needs to supplement their domestic workforce with foreign workers whenever U.S. workers cannot be located for the positions.
The Report found ...
EBG is holding its annual NY briefing for clients and friends on Oct. 28. This full-day program will feature a special, two-hour workshop just for employers in the hospitality and retail industries, updating the many recent and significant labor and employment law developments affecting the industry. We will provide real-world guidance on how to manage the risks your company faces from increasingly aggressive plaintiffs' lawyers and government investigators who have openly and unabashedly targeted the industry.
Topics on the workshop agenda include:
- Wage and hour class ...
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Recent Updates
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