A disabled employee has sued his employer after he was fired for failing to return to the office following the COVID-19 pandemic. Zacchery Beval, who suffers from various medical conditions, has filed suit against his former employer, Electric Boat Corp., alleging discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Connecticut Fair Employment Practices Act. He claims that Electric Boat failed to Read More

Gerdau Macsteel Inc. has agreed to settle a paternity leave case that could cost the steel manufacturer as much as $5 million. After Gerdau denied Nicholas Johnson, a non-union employee, six weeks of paid paternity leave after the birth of his child, Johnson sued the company under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and Michigan’s Elliot-Larsen Civil Rights Act. He alleged that he and other male employees were denied Read More

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has ruled that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) may require employers to provide reasonable accommodations for employees to commute. However, the court declined to establish a bright-line rule about when the ADA requires such accommodations. The case is EEOC v. Charter Communications LLC, 7th Cir., No. 22-1231 (July 28, 2023). An employee at Charter Read More

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) does not require employers to report employees as nonbinary on the EEO-1 form. While the form contains separate boxes for employers to designate male and female employees, there is no such box to designate an employee as nonbinary. However, the EEOC specifies that employers should use the comments section on the EEO-1 form to report these employees if they Read More

Pension funds for New York City and Oregon state have sued Fox Corp. and its board of directors in Delaware State Court, claiming that they promoted false reporting, thus inviting defamation suits, to the detriment of shareholders. According to the pension funds’ complaint, Fox News fails to ensure that its political narrative broadcasts are based on facts or credible sources. Unlike other media companies, it Read More

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit recently heard oral arguments over whether the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) properly found that Rite Aid violated labor laws in unilaterally imposing a bargaining proposal concerning employee health care coverage. The appellate court also considered whether the NLRB acted appropriately in ordering Rite Aid to contribute to a union’s health Read More

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has proposed increasing the annual salary threshold for white collar employee exemptions to overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Under the DOL proposal, the overtime salary threshold would increase from $35,568 to $55,068, with automatic increases every three years. The revised standard would apply to all fifty states and U.S. territories, except American Read More

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has announced the adoption of its strategic plan to cover fiscal years 2022 – 2026. The main focus of the new strategic plan is to increase public access to the EEOC and increase resources for agency investigations. In its strategic plan, the EEOC plans to devote additional resources to training staff to identify, investigate, and enforce systemic Read More

President Joe Biden signed the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) into law at the end of 2022. The law requires employers with fifteen or more employees to provide reasonable accommodations to qualified workers or applicants with known limitations related to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions. The provisions in the law build and expand upon Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Read More

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has settled its first discrimination lawsuit involving artificial intelligence (AI) in a New York federal district court. The EEOC and iTutorGroup filed a joint settlement, which provides that the tutoring company will pay $365,000 to resolve the charges against it. The EEOC alleged that iTutor’s AI hiring selection tool illegally screened out female applicants Read More