Stay Up To Date

Welcome to the Weekly Roundup for the week of July 6. If you’ve gone anywhere near the news this week, you’ll know that the South and West are spiking and states from Florida to California are reversing course and even considering new lockdowns.

Here in New York, the governors of the tri-state area have formalized a quarantine for visitors from the hardest hit states while also mooting any chance of indoor dining in the foreseeable future, which mounting research indicates is a significant source of potential infectio

Overall, we are beginning to see some patterns in the thematic nature of the complaints. Specifically, plaintiffs seem to be those whose employment has been terminated either after expressing concerns about workplace health and safety (e.g. improper distancing, lack of PPE, and not enforcing CDC-recommended quarantine procedures) and parents whose employment has been terminated because they were unable to locate appropriate childcare or family care.

Employees may find themselves retaliated against because of their protesting outside of the workplace, in person or online. But, as the protests continue, and the depth of feeling about their purpose grows, there will be increasing interest in using all available legal tools to allow employees to express their political views off-site while remaining employed.

Some employers may be concerned about the risk posed by the return of employees who have participated in protests to newly reopened workplaces. Similarly, employees may want to know whether their increased risk of exposure could affect their job security, and what their rights are in this situation.

This is the second installment in our roundup of FFCRA complaints. As we noted in the first post, we will be keeping you up to date with all the cases and highlighting the ones that we think have special bearing on our practice, employment law in New York State, or are just particularly noteworthy.

This week we’re looking at how women’s job losses are bad for the hops of a wider economic recovery, New York’s plans for phase three of reopening, and the trend to home birth trends, which we will also be discussing at greater length in a multi-post blog about coronavirus’s effects on pregnancy, abortion, and childbirth, specifically for low-income black women and women of color.

Since the end of March, we’ve spent a great deal of time talking about the economic and social impacts of coronavirus and the lockdowns on working parents, but today we want to talk about how it’s affecting pregnancy. Specifically, what is and isn’t being done to help pregnant women during this incredibly strange and new time.

In this edition, we’re looking at several employment-related stories, including more news on the childcare front, new considerations for coronavirus workplace safety, as well as some news about a project in which the Firm is participating.

In a stunning victory for LGBT employees and the movement at large, the U.S. Supreme Court has held 6-3 that gay and transgender people are protected by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans employment discrimination “because of sex.”

This week we’re highlighting several important developments regarding a return to work and the continued federal failure to properly address workplace safety, as well as more news on the childcare front, and a thoughtful consideration about how the global pandemic could get people thinking about family values in a new light.

As part of our ongoing coverage of how coronavirus is affecting workplace conditions and employment rights, we are providing a weekly summary of complaints filed to challenge alleged FFCRA violations.