Womble Employment Law Blog

The EEOC announced that it has settled a religious accommodation lawsuit against a beer distributor which insisted that a prospective employee cut his hair if wanted a job.  The prospective employee asserted that he was a practicing Rastafarian, and in accordance with his beliefs, was forbidden to cut his hair.  After being denied the job with the North Carolina company, he filed an EEOC charge, which ultimately resulted in the EEOC filing a lawsuit. In January, the EEOC announced that the parties had reached a settlement.  According to the EEOC, the company agreed to pay $50,000 and change its policies.  The EEOC announcement can be found here . 

Updated, September 19, 2017:  Due to the 2016 "white collar" regulations being struck down by a federal court, we have removed the Resource Page as no longer relevant or accurate. The last week of February is upon us, and the Department of Labor has not yet issued the highly anticipated new FLSA regulations which will propose changes to the white collar exemptions.   Announced by President Obama nearly a year ago, the proposed rules (which have already been postponed once) are currently scheduled for release sometime this month.   If the FLSA proposed rules become law, they are expected to dramatically change which employees can be classified as exempt, which in turn may significantly impact wages and overtime pay to workers. Womble Carlyle is pleased to announce a Resource Page to help businesses prepare for these proposed rules, which will be the most significant change to the FLSA in more than a decade.   The Resource Page provides businesses with the latest i...

Right now, many organizations are getting ready for a new class of interns to arrive in May when schools and colleges finish for the summer.   With fully laudable intentions, many organizations offer summer internships as a chance to allow students to get their feet wet in a business or industry, fully recognizing that the students’ contributions and added value, if any, are not that great. Experience teaches that many organizations do not pay interns.   However, this is often a risky proposition.   Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the legal standard to qualify as an unpaid internship is actually quite high.   The consequence of failing to meet that legal standard—and in our experience many may not—is that the “intern” is deemed to be a misclassified employee, and would be entitled to be paid minimum wage and overtime for all of the hours worked as an unpaid intern.   This exposure, including liquidated damages and potential penalties and attorneys’ fees...

The EEOC's new Chair, Jenny R. Yang, presided over her first commission meeting on January 14, 2015.  Ms. Yang was confirmed as a member of the EEOC in 2013 and served as Vice Chair.  She was appointed as the new Chair of the EEOC by President Obama last fall.  Ms. Yang has a distinguished professional history , and is the first Asian-American Chair of the EEOC. The EEOC's first meeting of 2015 focused on exploring effective ways to eliminate workplace harassment.  Panelists bringing multiple perspectives to the issue discussed ways to achieve that goal, with a number emphasizing the importance of awareness and workforce training.  Ms. Yang noted that the EEOC was committed to developing communication and outreach strategies to educate and inform, while also focusing on increased enforcement efforts directed to workplace harassment.   Ms. Yang stated that "[b]y identifying underlying probl...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics ("BLS") released its annual summary of labor union membership for 2014 on January 23, 2015.  Overall union membership in the U.S. continues to decline.  Some interesting highlights from the BLS information: The total labor union membership rate (public and private sector) was 11.1%, down slightly from 2013.  The BLS reports that about 14.6 million workers were union members in 2014. The union membership rate in the private sector decreased to 6.2%.  The rate for the public sector was much higher, at 35.7%, but was also down from 2013. North Carolina had the lowest union membership rate in the U.S., at just 1.9% (down from 3% in 2013).  South Carolina was the second lowest at 2.2%. New York had the highest membership rate, at 24.6%, followed by Alaska (22.8%) and Hawaii (21.8%). Younger workers have lower union membership rates.  For workers ages 25-34, the rate is 9.5%, as compared to ...

The DOL's highly anticipated proposed rule to amend the FLSA exemptions for administrative, executive, and professional employees is reportedly coming in February 2015.  For more details, check out our post on Womble's Fair Labor Standards Act Law Blog, which you can find here .

This week, a former airline employee is to be sentenced for his part in a 14-year scheme that defrauded Delta Air Lines, and its predecessor, Northwest Airlines, out of $36 Million. An FBI investigation revealed that a long-time employee of Northwest and Delta conspired with another person to obtain payment from the airline by submitting invoices for services that were never provided. According to published reports, Paul Anderson was a company manager who had worked for Northwest then Delta since 1979. Michael Yedor was not an employee of the airline, but owned a company called Airborne Voice and Data. The two came up with a plan to defraud the airline, which they carried out between 1999 and 2013. The scheme, which the U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case in Atlanta called “astounding,” worked like this: In order to receive payment for the false invoices, Yedor sent the invoices to Anderson, who had the authority to approve them for payment. Once Anderson approved the invoices,...