Leave

Senior Associate Alex Berke is quoted by Law360 in an article about proposed prenatal leave in New York.

Growing awareness of the impact of menopause is prompting employers to reassess how they support women going through this stage of life, including better policies and accommodations for affected workers.

New employment laws going into effect this year.

All public and private employees in New York may use paid time off to receive Covid-19 vaccinations. According to the language of the bill, employees are eligible for up to four hours of excused leave for each injection they receive. This excused leave does not affect any other accrued leave an employee might have already.

As Congress races to finalize a new round of stimulus for the nation, stricken at the moment with the winter surge that epidemiologists predicted, workers are under threat of losing access to paid emergency leave as well as paid sick days. According to the National Partnership for Women & Families, allowing such provisions to expire would be a grave mistake.

This week Law 360 published a helpful guide to how the pandemic has changed employment law in New York and what kinds of impacts those changes will have into 2021 and beyond.

It appears employers continue to terminate workers who are supposed to be protected under the FFCRA. This week, we’ve highlighted several cases where employees were waiting for test results or already diagnosed with Covid-19 and subsequently fired when seeking paid leave.

Since we started this weekly blog post in May, we've read and summarized over 50 complaints filed under the new leave law. As we’ve pointed out, many of these complaints follow almost a template, with workers being terminated for either taking legally-allowed precautions to protect fellow workers from potential infection or for having legitimate reasons to take leave, often to care for a family member or child.

The complaints we found relevant this week are eerily similar—parents who need to take care of their children, some of whom are immunocompromised, are being denied telework or leave or are being terminated. Further, we are continuing to see plaintiffs who voice concerns to their employers about workplace safety being terminated after doing so.

S.D.N.Y. Judge Paul Oetken invalidated parts of the Department of Labor’s interpretation of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act in a lawsuit brought by New York State Attorney General Letitia James.

As we noted last week, employers seem not to have gotten the message on paid leave under FFCRA and the two notable cases that came up this week both involve employer retaliation and wrongful termination against employees who were protected under FFCRA.

t is starting to seem, from our perspective, that either employers have not been made sufficiently aware of the leave entitled to workers under the FFCRA or that they are willing to risk a lawsuit for wrongful termination.