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Employers want all employees to do their work and go home safely each day.  A workplace injury is bad news for everyone.  When OSHA or a similar state safety agency gets involved, it becomes an even bigger problem for employers.  That reality is even more true today as OSHA’s maximum fines have recently increased, and it has added new recordkeeping and reporting requirements that raise further concerns for employers.

Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, employers are responsible for providing safe and healthful workplaces for their employees. OSHA’s stated role is “to ensure [safe working] conditions for America’s working men and women by setting and enforcing standards, and providing training, education and assistance.”

While speaking at a conference this year, I asked members of the Human Resources community to raise their hands if they routinely instructed employees not to discuss internal investigations.  No surprise, most of the hands (maybe all of them) went up.

For many good reasons, most employers instruct employees to keep the fact of and contents of investigations confidential.  For example, when investigations become public, employees often become less willing to come forward and discuss the nature of the investigation.  Also, in most instances the nature of the investigation involves sensitive information, like a harassment complaint.  Yet, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has indicated that reasons such as these are not legally sufficient to tell employees to keep their mouths shut.

In 2011, the U. S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision regarding certification of employment discrimination class actions. The opinion, Wal-Mart v. Dukes, rejected the “trial by formula” approach of allowing a random sample of the class members’ claims to be tried, with the results of those trials to be applied to the entire class. Among other problems, the Court found that this shortcut approach deprived defendants of the ability to litigate statutory defenses to individualized claims. Dukes, however, did not reach the narrower issue of whether “representative,” “sample” or “anecdotal” evidence” is ever appropriate in a class-action employment case.

The National Labor Relations Board issued a landmark decision yesterday, reversing its precedent and establishing a new standard for determining when entities can be considered “joint employers” under the National Labor Relations Act. The 3-2 decision in Browning-Ferris Industries of California, Inc. held that Browning-Ferris, the owner and operator of a recycling facility, was a joint employer with its contractor, who provided workers (sorters, screen cleaners and housekeepers) to Browning-Ferris through a temporary labor services agreement. In its decision, the Board departed from its prior joint employer standard in significant ways. The new standard will make it much easier to establish a joint-employer relationship under the NLRA. Workers formerly excluded from union representation as non-employees could now be considered members of a collective bargaining unit with legal rights to negotiate terms and conditions of their employment through a union.

If you are a federal contractor subject to Section 503, then you are aware of the new regulations that were released in September 2013. While those regulations were released nearly two years ago, the most burdensome of these requirements (implementation of the Subpart C requirements) have not yet been implemented by most contractors because of the transition year period that allowed contractors to delay compliance with Subpart C. As contractors have been permitted to delay compliance, we have seen virtually no enforcement from OFCCP of the Subpart C requirements in audits. That is all about to change.

National_Labor_Relations_Board_logo_-_colorEarlier this year, on March 18, 2015, NLRB General Counsel Richard F. Griffin, Jr. issued a report covering recent cases on employee handbook rules that encroached on employees’ Section 7 rights under the National Labor Relations Act.  Griffin’s report (GC Memo 15-04) stated that the vast majority of handbook violations are due to employers’ failure to comply with the first prong of the Lutheran Heritage test.  The report also provides timely guidance to employers in light of a recent NLRB decision against a fast-food restaurant’s finding Section 7 violations in its employee handbook.

Protecting alleged “whistleblowers” has become a greater and greater priority of government agencies in recent years.  When agencies believe employers are taking actions that stifle the “whistleblowing” of employees, they are quick to take strong action.  For the first time, an agency that gets plenty of attention from companies has joined in this effort.

If you have a union in your workplace, or if unions have tried to organize workers in your workplace, you know that unions need ways to communicate with your employees.  Before the current digital age, unions relied primarily on communicating through informational picketing and leafleting, posters and mailings, and individual and group meeting to encourage unionization or to communicate with members and represented employees.  Today, with the modern workplace and internet-connected workers, communications can be conducted far more quickly, efficiently, cheaply and often more effectively through electronic means, such as email.  But historically, unions have not been permitted access to company email systems.  The current rule is that “employees have no statutory right to use the[ir] Employer’s e-mail system” for non-work-related purposes. If unions and the current Presidential administration get their way, that all might change.

As we previously discussed here, the National Labor Relations Board announced last month that it will seek U.S. Supreme Court review of the D.C. Circuit’s Noel Canning decision, which invalidated President Obama’s purported recess appointments to the Board, and held that the existing three-member Board lacks the quorum required for it to legally act. The Board’s deadline to request Supreme Court review (known as a petition for certiorari) is April 25, 2013, but even if the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case, this matter will not be resolved quickly and the Board’s refusal to curtail its activities pending that resolution continues to vex both employers and unions.

In the meantime, both the President and House Republicans are seeking ways to avoid ongoing action by the Board without the required quorum.