by Susan G. Fentin

Governor Deval Patrick recently signed the Massachusetts Economic Development Bill into law. The law, which is retroactively effective to August 1, includes some well-known provisions that authorize a new state sales tax holiday and grant tax breaks for certain businesses.

The bill, however, also contains several lesser-known provisions, including one that heavily affects employers. Buried more than 100 pages into the Economic Development Bill is a modification of the state Personnel Records Statute that now requires employers to notify an employee when negative information is entered into his or her personnel record.

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By Nancy Williams

Last April, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave the green light to a nationwide sex discrimination class action against Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., the nation’s largest employer. Unwilling to permit the suit to proceed without a further challenge, Wal-Mart has now petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit the class certification issue. The Ninth Circuit’s decision had defined a class of up to 1.5 million women who worked at any Wal-Mart in the last 12 years, making the lawsuit the largest potential class action ever pursued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Wal-Mart’s petition argues that the case raises important questions under Title VII and affects operations at some 3,400 separately managed stores. Permitting the massive suit to proceed on a class basis risks violating the rights not only of Wal-Mart but also potentially of many class members. The company also urges the Court to consider whether class treatment is the appropriate mechanism for an action that focuses primarily on monetary damages and highly individual claims and defenses.

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by Steve Brenneman

Effective January 1, 2011, Illinois employers will have yet another restriction on their ability to make employment decisions. A new law will prohibit many employers from basing hiring, promotion, and other employment decisions on an employee or job applicant’s credit history.

The Employee Credit Privacy Act (HB 4658), which was signed into law by Governor Pat Quinn yesterday, also forbids employers from inquiring about or obtaining a copy of an applicant or employee’s credit history or credit report. Illinois joins Washington, Hawaii, Oregon, and Louisiana in prohibiting the use of credit histories in employment decisions.

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Many companies are staying put at their current employment levels (40%) or adding only 1-4 jobs (30%) in the last half of 2010, according to results of the Hiring 2010 HR Hero Line survey. Fewer than 15% of the respondents are planning to reduce staffs.

Companies that are adding jobs cited a variety of reasons, including the need to supplement current threadbare staffing (15%) and an uptick in their particular industry (also 15%). “Just need a few more people,” one HR pro wrote. “Growth in our community supported the additional hiring,” said another.

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OSHA is making aggressive use of “egregious violations” to levy large fines and make an example of employers where it considers hazards to have been very serious, including a $16.6 million fine in Connecticut last week and another case in Wisconsin. But the question is whether the violations will hold up in the face of aggressive litigation by employers.

“Over past years, in a limited number of cases, OSHA has alleged a separate violation and proposed a separate penalty for each instance of non-compliance with OSHA recordkeeping regulations, safety and health standards and with the general duty clause,” reported Jim Stanley, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA.

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The U.S. Senate confirmed Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court Thursday in a 63-37 vote. As expected, the senators voted along party lines, with only five Republicans voting to confirm President Barack Obama’s nominee. The final step in Kagan’s road to the Supreme Court will be a White House swearing-in ceremony.

Kagan will become the 112th Supreme Court justice and will join Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Sonia Sotomayor as the third woman on the current Supreme Court. In the history of the Court, she will be the fourth female justice.

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HRHero is inviting all our HR and business friends to participate in our new HR Feud survey, where you’ll tell your opinion on employment law and HR issues. Then during lunch at the upcoming Advanced Employment Issues Symposium (AEIS), conference participants can see if they can guess the most popular answers to our survey questions.

Take the HR Feud survey
Voting ends on Thursday, August 6, 2008

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On Monday, July 19, the Federal Register published interim final regulations from the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Labor, and the Treasury requiring new health plans beginning on or after September 23, 2010, to cover certain evidence-based preventive care without cost sharing. In other words, plans cannot charge patients copayments, coinsurance, or deductibles for such services (if a network provider supplies the services). However, the preventive care requirements do not apply to grandfathered plans.

The regulations are designed to implement the preventive health services requirements under the massive health care reform legislation (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act) that became law in March. These regulations are the latest part of a series of rules the administration has issued to implement various provisions of health care reform.

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This morning, President Barack Obama issued a statement from the White House voicing his support for — and urging Congress to move forward on — the Paycheck Fairness Act (PFA). In the statement, the President referred to the bill as a “commonsense bill” that is one of the key recommendations of the Equal Pay Enforcement Task Force.

The PFA (S. 182; H.R. 11) was initially introduced in 2008 as a companion to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. The bill, which passed in the U.S. House of Representatives in January 2009, has since been on hold in the Senate. The PFA would amend the Equal Pay Act of 1963 (EPA) in numerous ways, including: read more…

Today the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) hosted a live webcast interview with Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. During the webcast, both parties made the case for the necessity of comprehensive immigration reform, decrying individual state movements such as the controversial immigration law in Arizona as a means for racial profiling and shifting blame for economic failures onto undocumented workers.

Trumka outlined the AFL-CIO’s proposed five-point approach, which he noted is the first position to receive unanimous support from every member union of the AFL-CIO. The five points are (1) a mechanism to let current undocumented workers gain legal status, (2) an independent commission to monitor labor shortages, preventing immigration from being a way to drive down wages for the rest of the American people, (3) reasonable border enforcement, (4) strict employer compliance, which includes issuance of some form of tamperproof identification, and (5) putting an eventual end to guest-worker programs.

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