Articles by PC Editorial Staff

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL’s) Wage and Hour Department (WHD) announced that they recovered over $1.1 million in back wages after a Texas-based company withheld wages owed to employees. Additionally, the DOL encouraged all employers to utilize its employee Timesheet app to better record hours worked, overtime, breaks, and compute total wages. The agency stressed that...

The U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL’s) Wage and Hour Division (WHD) and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) recently announced a partnership that will strengthen the labor law enforcement efforts of both agencies. Jointly, the agencies solidified their partnership in a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). Within the MOU, the agencies agree to combine resources and efforts to enforc...

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (Ninth Circuit) issued an opinion in a recent case that broadly interpreted provisions under the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), specifically FAA exemptions. The Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction covers the states and territories of Alaska, Arizona, California, Guam, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, the Northern Mariana Islands, Oregon, and Wash...

On September 11th, 2023, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced that the agency reached a final settlement and consent decree in a recent discriminatory hiring lawsuit involving artificial intelligence (AI) hiring technologies. The company, a tutoring service offering English-language tutoring to Chinese students, will pay $365,000 and furnish other relief to rejected...

In two recent decisions, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) adopted a broader test for determining “protected concerted activity” under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and extending those protections to workers advocating for non-employees. Both decisions overturned prior rulings, which had taken more restricted interpretations of Section 7 of the NLRA (Section 7). Many recent NL...

New cybersecurity reporting and disclosure requirements that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published in August have taken effect this month. Specifically, these disclosure requirements affect public companies. The requirements will standardize and enhance these companies’ disclosures regarding cybersecurity risk management, strategy, governance, and material cybersecurity inciden...

The Department of Labor’s (DOL’s) Wage and Hour Division (WHD) announced on September 8th, 2023, that a Georgia-based contractor would pay over $693 thousand for unpaid overtime wages and other damages. What’s more, WHD investigators determined that the contractor schemed to deny the overtime wages by deliberately lowering wage rates for its construction workers. Wage and hour standards under t...

Recently, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) announced a proposed rule to increase the salary threshold for overtime exemption. The proposed rule would ensure overtime pay for most low-paid salary workers who earn less than $1,059 a week (or $55,000 a year). By the DOL’s estimates, this proposed rule would benefit 3.6 million employees. Additionally, the proposed rule seeks to further clarify t...

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recently proposed changes to regulations related to authorized employee representation during OSHA inspections in the workplace. Specifically, the proposed rule clarifies existing regulation under the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) that allows employees and employers to be accompanied by an authorized representative during w...

The U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL’s) Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced last week that a contractor in Colorado faces sentencing in a manslaughter case after trenching and excavation safety violations led to a fatality. In the 2021 incident, the contractor failed to provide required trench protection systems at a worksite in Breckinridge, Colorado. This ultimately ...