Although “joint employment” is not a new legal concept, in recent years federal agencies such as the Department of Labor and National Labor Relations Board have made aggressive efforts to expand its application. The targets of those who seek to expand the concept of joint employment are typically employers who use independent contractors (common in

As many employers recall with chagrin, the National Labor Relations Board and its General Counsel were very active during the Obama administration, overturning long-established precedent, changing rules in a way that favored unions over employers, and inserting itself into employment issues where the Board traditionally had not acted.

The NLRB, now with a majority

As employment cases go, the 2018–2019 adjudicative term (covered in Part I here) may go down as a year of missed chances. In Hawkins v. Grinnell Regional Medical Center, Patrick Smith wrote in June, the Justices failed to address an emotional-distress award’s excessiveness and the permissibility of a “golden rule” argument used in

The Iowa Supreme Court wrapped up its latest adjudicative term on June 28, 2019, having submitted 113 cases. More remarkable for the changes it witnessed than for its labor and employment decisions, the term began with the Court’s first new Justice since 2011.  By term’s end another had been appointed.  The Court that completed this

On March 14, the Department of Labor issued an opinion letter to answer the following two questions about FMLA leave:  1) may an employer delay designating leave as FMLA covered, even if the leave is for a FMLA qualifying reason, to allow the employee to exhaust paid leave first;   2) may an employer expand an

There is reason to be concerned the AFSCME lawsuit challenging the recent collective bargaining amendments will undermine the legislature’s effort to reform public sector collective bargaining.  As discussed in our previous post on the new law, AFSCME Council 61, the state’s largest public employee union, filed a lawsuit to invalidate the new law on February