AUTHOR: Jim Stinson | PUBLISHED - July 16, 2020

Dive Brief:

• J.B. Hunt agreed to settle a February 2019 lawsuit alleging California drivers were misclassified as independent contractors (Duy Nam Ly, et al. v. J.B. Hunt Transport Inc. No. 2:19-cv-01334 (C.D. Calif. July 6, 2020)). The drivers' filing seeks approval for the settlement, which would award 312 drivers an average of $20,000. The total value of the settlement was pegged at $6.5 million by law firm Marlin & Saltzman.
• In the most significant claim, J.B. Hunt allegedly failed "to reimburse for necessary business expenses" under California labor law, but the drivers also alleged failure to give breaks and failure to meet minimum pay levels. The claims came after J.B. Hunt allegedly put the drivers under Intermodal Independent Contractor Operating Agreements (ICOA), which asserted drivers were responsible for paying their expenses.
• The case hinged on the drivers' claim that J.B. Hunt misclassified them, a huge labor policy issue in California. The lawsuit turned into a mediation and ended as attorneys for both sides agreed they did not want the case to drag on for years, according to the filing.

Dive Insight:

The J.B. Hunt case could have turned into a major application of the California Supreme Court's decision, Dynamex Operations West Inc. v. Superior Court of Los Angeles, an April 30, 2018, ruling. The decision rocked California employers, who were thus instructed to classify persons as independent contractors only if they met three criteria.

Those criteria became known as the "ABC test." California companies, from trucking firms to hair salons, could classify workers as independent contractors if: 

(A) The worker is free from the hirer's control and direction in connection with the performance of the work while under the contract for the performance of such work.

(B) The worker performs a job that is outside the usual scope of the hiring entity’s business.

(C) The worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation or business of the same nature as the work performed for the hiring entity.

The drivers claimed they did not qualify to be listed as independent contractors, yet were denied meal and rest breaks, as well as minimum pay. The alleged expenses claimed exceeded $17 million, according to the filing.

It was not the first time J.B. Hunt has disputed California labor policy. In February 2018, J.B. Hunt asked the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on the state's meal-and-break law. Under California law, employees must get a 30-minute food break if they work more than five hours a day. Employees who work more than 10 hours a day must receive a second 30-minute food break, according to Shouse California Law Group.

J.B. Hunt said California could not override federal law, which does not require meal or break periods. And on this point, California labor law has been hotly disputed by the California Trucking Association (CTA), which has sued to nullify AB5's effect on trucking.

In May, 13 industry groups and trucking firms signed on to four amicus briefs in support of the CTA in the AB5 lawsuit. Proceedings are ongoing in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The main argument against AB5 by trucking officials is that the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act of 1994 prevents states from legislating policy "related to a price, route, or service of any motor carrier … with respect to the transportation of property."

J.B. Hunt officials did not immediately return a request for comment. The drivers will go to court on Aug. 17 in a Los Angeles federal court to seek approval of the agreement.

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Source: HR Dive

https://www.hrdive.com/news/JB-Hunt-settlement-lawsuit-truck-driver-misclassification-contractors-California-July-2020/581735/

AUTHOR

Hailey Mensik

PUBLISHED

July 17, 2020

Dive Brief:

• An estimated 48 million non-elderly people in the U.S. could be part of a household in which someone loses a job due to COVID-19 between April and December, according to an analysis from the Urban Institute and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. As a result, more than 10 million people may lose employer-sponsored health insurance during that time.
• Some 3.3 million people are expected to regain insurance by being added to another family member's policy while 2.8 million people will enroll in Medicaid.
• Another 600,000 people are expected to enroll in the individual market through the Affordable Care Act's marketplace. Still, 3.5 million people are expected to become uninsured.

Dive Insight:

Despite some gains in June, the U.S. unemployment rate is hovering around 11%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This February, the U.S. unemployment rate was 3.5%.

The latest findings predict ongoing pandemic-related job losses will lead to widespread loss of coverage, using projections on employment losses by industry, state, and demographic characteristics regularly published by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Of the 48 million expected to lose a job during the period, about 34% of the workers and family members experiencing job loss within the family had insurance through another family member's job, while 27% were covered by Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program prior to the pandemic. 

Roughly a fifth of the group received insurance tied to the job they lost due to the pandemic. A smaller share were covered in plans through the non-group market, other public programs or were not insured. 

Researchers also found that higher percentages of people will lose their coverage in states that did not expand Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act. Some 13 states, including many that have seen a recent surge in COVID-19 cases, have yet to expand Medicaid, including Florida and Texas.

The report estimates 34% of people losing employer coverage will become uninsured in Medicaid expansion states, and that number will hike to 55% in non-expansion states.

"The economic disruption caused by COVID-19 is a test of the safety net health insurance programs created under the Affordable Care Act," the study said. Unemployed workers who lost their employer-sponsored coverage may become eligible for one of the two major subsidized coverage programs established by the ACA: the Medicaid expansion for people with low incomes, and the ACA marketplaces.

It's the latest in myriad reports attempting to quantify the very real affects of the pandemic on the number of insured. 

A recent study from Families USA estimates 5.4 million Americans have lost coverage amid the pandemic between February and May, while Kaiser Family Foundation estimates 27 million Americans lost coverage between March and May.

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Source: HR Dive

https://www.hrdive.com/news/10-million-could-lose-employer-sponsored-coverage/581818/

Mary Baker - Gartner

July 14, 2020

Now Organizations Must Manage a More Complex, Hybrid Workforce

A Gartner, Inc. survey on June 5 of 127 company leaders, representing HR, Legal and Compliance, Finance and Real Estate, revealed 82% of respondents intend to permit remote working some of the time as employees return to the workplace. For many organizations with employees working both onsite and remotely, adapting to a new, more complex hybrid workforce is the challenge as how people work together to get their job done evolves.

Nearly half (47%) said they intend to allow employees to work remotely full time going forward. For some organizations, flex time will be the new norm as 43% of survey respondents reported they will grant employees flex days, while 42% will provide flex hours (see Figure 1).

“The COVID-19 pandemic brought about a huge experiment in widespread remote working,” said Elisabeth Joyce, vice president of advisory in the Gartner HR practice. “As business leaders plan and execute reopening of their workplaces, they are evaluating more permanent remote working arrangements as a way to meet employee expectations and to build more resilient business operations.”

Figure 1: Company leader intentions regarding flexible working after COVID-19

Organizations that are welcoming employees back to the workplace are instituting a variety of safety measures. Respondents were nearly unanimous in planning to limit face-to-face meetings (94%) and providing protective equipment such as masks and hand sanitizer (91%). Eighty-three percent of respondents said they intend to limit or sequence employee attendance at the workplace.

“The question now facing many organizations is not how to manage a remote workforce, but how to manage a more complex, hybrid workforce,” said Ms. Joyce. “While remote work isn’t new, the degree of remote work moving forward will change how people work together to get their job done.”

As employers move toward a hybrid workforce, the productivity of remote employees is a frequent topic of conversation. However, just 13% of business leaders voiced concerns over sustaining productivity. While 61% of business leaders surveyed by Gartner have implemented more frequent manager-employee check-ins, 29% report not taking any measures to track productivity remotely.

Among the challenges of managing a hybrid workforce, 30% of business leaders are most concerned with maintaining corporate culture. Thirteen percent of respondents reported concern over creating parity between the remote and in-office experience; 13% also are concerned about providing a seamless employee experience.

“It is critical that employers get their corporate culture and employee experience right during this period of uncertainty,” said Brian Kropp, chief of research for the Gartner HR practice. “Both facets help ensure organizations achieve the financial, reputation and talent outcomes that will drive business outcomes and competitive advantage.

Gartner for HR clients can learn more by viewing the webinar Return to the Workplace: Benchmarking Against Your Peers.

CHROs and HR leaders can learn more about how to lead organizations through the disruption of coronavirus in the Gartner coronavirus resource center for HR, a collection of complimentary Gartner research and webinars to help organizations globally respond, manage and prepare for the next phase of COVID-19.

About Gartner

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is the world’s leading research and advisory company and a member of the S&P 500. We equip business leaders with indispensable insights, advice and tools to achieve their mission-critical priorities today and build the successful organizations of tomorrow.

Our unmatched combination of expert-led, practitioner-sourced and data-driven research steers clients toward the right decisions on the issues that matter most. We are a trusted advisor and an objective resource for more than 15,000 enterprises in more than 100 countries — across all major functions, in every industry and enterprise size.

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Source: Gartner

https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-07-14-gartner-survey-reveals-82-percent-of-company-leaders-plan-to-allow-employees-to-work-remotely-some-of-the-time 

AUTHOR - Ryan Golden | PUBLISHED - July 9, 2020

As the COVID-19 pandemic creeps into July, many employees are rescheduling, rethinking or outright canceling vacation and holiday plans. That's causing employers to question whether paid time off (PTO) policies are prepared to handle the fallout.

The pandemic had already disrupted employee benefits plans, and not just due to the impact of furloughs, layoffs and other employment actions. Healthcare has seen a dramatic shift in care delivery with the rise of virtual care. And specialized employee benefits, like fertility treatment, have been affected by shutdowns.

Yet state and local stay-at-home orders and other similar policies persist, and employees may find limited options to simply get away from work. Faced with that challenge, many are cutting back: a May survey of U.S. workers by Robert Half found more than one third planned to save vacation time for later in the year, and more than one quarter said they would take fewer days off compared to last summer.

"Universally, we're hearing from employers that employees are taking less time off than they would have when the pandemic started," Rich Fuerstenberg, senior partner at HR consulting firm Mercer, said in an interview. Jamie Coakley, VP of people at New York-based information technology services firm Electric, concurred in an email statement: "Many employees have paused upcoming vacation plans, not only for fear of traveling and keeping their families safe — but in many cases, because they're anxious about job security as well."

The trend has implications not only for employee well-being, but also for employers and their policies, even organizations that crafted leave policies to be flexible and prepared for any situation. "These plans got stress tested," Fuerstenberg said. Employers might have thought those policies were meeting employees' needs, but in light of the pandemic, he noted, "maybe it turns out they don't."

How to handle accrual

Accrual is likely to be the biggest issue in this space moving forward. Some companies employ use- it-or-lose-it rules that require workers to use the leave they've accrued before the end of the year, Fuerstenberg said. But it could be equally problematic for large numbers of workers to hold onto that leave at the end of the year, assuming travel restrictions ease up.

"That's an issue that gets compounded when employers start to look forward to the second part of the year," he added. "You have employers saying that all hands are on deck, and that we need to make up for sales lost earlier in the year, but employees saying they have all this paid time off." Fuerstenberg said he thinks employers may be especially worried about the implications of deferred time off during the holiday season.

Employers may decide to strategize around the problem in a variety of ways. One option is to change PTO rollover rules and extend the amount of time in which workers may take accrued leave, potentially after December. "While we've heard from many employers who have chosen to relax their 'use it or lose it' policies on vacations this year, it has definitely not happened across the board," Paul McDonald, senior executive director at Robert Half, told HR Dive in an email. Managers at companies that have not relaxed such policies should ensure employees are aware so that they don't leave unused vacation days on the table, he added.

Others have simply asked employees to take their accrued time sooner rather than later to avoid the problem of a "glut" of paid leave later in the year, Fuerstenburg said, even if there's nowhere for employees to go due to shutdowns. Employers might opt to close up shop entirely, he added, putting the entire organization on vacation.

A broader call to action?

Employers might also need to re-evaluate PTO policies on a more fundamental level, Fuerstenberg noted. Some of the clients he has spoken with are making more major tweaks, like moving to an unlimited PTO policy to preliminarily deal with accrual rates that are already building up.

Recent research shows a fair amount of organizations are at least willing to have a conversation about the issue. An April survey of employers by Willis Towers Watson found that one-third of the 816 respondents planned to make changes to their PTO or vacation programs. And in the Robert Half survey, 25% of employees said their manager encouraged them to take time off.

Regardless of the difficulties posed by travel restrictions, sources generally agreed on the need for employers to encourage workers to take time off during the pandemic. "If your employee is concerned about going on a trip, encourage a 'staycation' to at least take the planned time for themselves," Coakley said. "Everyone needs to reset at some point and that time will give room to come back with a fresh mind — ultimately allowing them to be more engaged and productive."

At Robert Half, managers are reinforcing this message at "every touchpoint," McDonald said, indicating to workers their concern for employee well-being. "This pandemic has forced organizations to be more creative and innovative in the way they serve their clients and do their work, and actually getting some time away to reset will offer the even greater benefit of boosting creativity and helping with overall productivity and happiness."

Sudden shifts to a remote work environment have brought, among other things, a sense of repetitiveness to the employee experience, Fuerstenburg said — he compared it to the movie "Groundhog Day" — and this can cause even more burnout and stress for employees than usual. But managers, executives and other organizational leaders must be willing to lead by example, he noted, so employees feel comfortable taking the time they need.

"If that means your vacation spot is not a cruise, so be it," Fuerstenberg said. "Still, it's important to unplug and recharge and not be working all day every day."

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Source: HR Dive

https://www.hrdive.com/news/employer-vacation-pto-policies-worked-then-came-the-covid-19-stress-test/581256/

David Rice | 07/09/2020

The fallout of COVID-19 has been significant for companies as HR teams scrambled to cope with the implications for their people and business models. As the dust has settled, life has needed to go on with the business facing new challenges, whether that is an increase in demand or figuring out new ways to keep things running.

To do it, HR leaders are having to encourage their current workforces to adopt a different mindset, one centered on flexibility and what’s best for the business as well as themselves. COVID has created a great deal of uncertainty, but problems can be mitigated through encouraging an open mind and creating meaningful discourse around career mapping and reskilling.

Reskilling or upskilling is something you hear a lot about these days. The focus for the current workforce typically falls into one of a few areas:  

• Preparing people for the challenges of tomorrow
• Making people more flexible to deal with the current situation
• Helping employees create new paths forward

Doing something that creates any one of these things as a result is a win-win for both people and the organization, but executing it is easier said than done. Rhonda Hall, VP of HR and Organizational Development for University Federal Credit Union reminds us, it’s important to keep in mind that effective reskilling and career mapping is a journey, not an exercise.

“When HR folks are talking about reskilling employees, the main focus should be two-fold: what serves the employee best and what serves the business best,” Hall said. “It is the careful balance of these two things that will ultimately result in success for all. Skewed too heavily toward the business, and you end up with a disgruntled employee. Skewed too much toward the employee, and you end up with roles and people in roles that the business can’t support long term. When walking the reskilling balance beam, be up front that reskilling isn’t a “one and done” experience. It should be gradual, with levels in mind, and iterative.”

The Keys to Career Mapping

Patience is indeed a necessity in effective career mapping. The fact is, employees are dealing with a lot right now, from the uncertainty around the economy to the ongoing stress around health hazards and social issues. To keep them engaged in thinking about their future within the organization, the career mapping and reskilling conversation has to be personal and transparent.

“Each reskilling event for each organization, for each position, is customized and could be any or all three of these (the bullets listed above), at any time,” Hall said. “If people think of this as a linear path, they will be frustrated. If thought of in a cyclical manner though, satisfaction is possible. For me, transparency is the key. An organization has to be willing to be transparent, to tell it like it is, help people understand what that means for them, and then together, through two-way dialogue design a path that works for that role and that employee, and they may be different for different roles and people.”

HR professionals can likely guess the impact of not doing this. It’s likely that without some engagement and improvement to the employee experience in how they’re growth and path forward is discussed, HR teams are going to have to spend a lot of time on recruitment and talent acquisition when things to return to something resembling normal.

“COVID has rocked our worlds,” Hall said. “Employees are being asked and given opportunities to flex their mental skills like never before. Shame on the company that doesn’t take the time to learn how that experience was for each employee.”

The Conversation

Hall suggests that companies should be looking forward to the individual dialogues that career mapping creates. The questions they should look for answers to include things like:

• What did you like and not like about shifting to support another area?
• Did you feel prepared to be successful at the beginning?
• How did you learn the new role, processes and systems?
• What about 30 days and 90 days into it, did you find that you did enjoy certain parts of the work? Which parts?
• What fears did you have coming into that new/expanded role? What about now, what fears do you have now that you’ve been there for 4 months?
• What else interests you? Where else would you like to learn more?

An organization that takes the time to learn what that experience was like for their employee, how they handled the change, and where they see themselves now and in the future is an organization that will increase their employee engagement and in the end have more satisfied employees. But Hall warns, this process is not entirely down to HR.

“The caution I have, is that this isn’t HR’s role, this is Leadership’s role,” Hall said. “Leadership should be skilled and trained by HR to be ready to have these conversations, and to be able to create a report out of what they learned to be consumed across the leadership team with HR at the table. It is in this manner that we as leaders grow to better understand our employees’ passion, strengths and opportunities.”

Career mapping conversations aren’t always comfortable, requiring a patient and empathetic approach that puts the employee at the center to help them see the possibilities.

“Enter into the conversation with a desire to understand what the experience has been like for that employee,” Hall said. “It’s the basic ‘seek first to understand’ approach that will make this conversation most effective. Approach with admiration, empathy and be inquisitive. Don’t judge their experience or their reaction to their experience, but hear it, honor it, and learn from it. If you listen deeply, beyond what is said, but also to what’s not said, you as an HR person will learn so much more and will be best poised to help that employee through this and future transitions.”

Building Business Resilience

For some businesses, coping with COVID-19 has meant re-evaluating their operational models. Supply chains have been disrupted and the budget to dip into the talent pool for a solution eroded. Even for those who have seen business boom or had little impact on what they do, it’s made clear the risk of not examining operational effectiveness and preparing for the unforeseeable.

A report from McKinsey & Company has taken a closer look at the talent landscape following the impact of COVID-19 and relays a message of needing to reskill and upskill the workforce to deliver on post pandemic business models.

For all the talk of automation, AI and remote work disrupting the workforce coming into 2020, it’s been a human factor (Coronavirus) that actually did change the way we do things and in the end it’s the human factors that are going deliver results in the future. Companies need to invest time into developing talent strategies which develop the digital capabilities of their people, along with their cognitive and soft skills to create a workforce that is adaptable and capable of rising to future challenges.

“Developing a digitally ready workforce requires assessing your company’s current talent in terms of both hard and soft skills. You also need to understand their passion for learning and curiosity,” writes Yoland Lau for Forbes. “Support continuous, ongoing learning within your team, and help individuals develop the best personal learning pathway. Developing digitally ready talent isn’t a one-size-fits-all journey.”

As of right now, there is something of a talent supply and demand imbalance. Gig economy workers, for example, may need to find work in related industries but under different conditions. Think of an Uber driver turning to something like Shipt or Amazon for example. More and more consumers are turning to e-commerce, meaning there may not be as much need in sectors such as retail or even hospitality and already we’ve seen stories of hospitality workers turning to things such as senior care as a new avenue of opportunity. That adjustment, however, takes a significant amount of reskilling and training for them to be effective.

It’s possible that some jobs which were offshored in recent decades may be brought closer to the point of sale in an effort to increase the effectiveness of supply chains. The automotive and manufacturing industries have already been on an automation journey for some time, but developing a digitally capable workforce closer to home is needed in order to make that new business model work.

The Learning Investment

Businesses have been ramping up their investment in developing a learning ecosystem, an environment where a variety of learning tools help drive employee development. At this stage, budgets dedicated to learning should not only be protected, but further increased to sufficiently meet the needs associated with the development of new business models.

As organizations identify the skills their new models rely on, they then have to tailor learning journeys that will help their people tackle the challenges the organization faces. Those critical skill gaps may not be easy to bridge, so, as the McKinsey report emphasized, be prepared to test different strategies and develop iterations.

Amazon, for example, recently partnered with Merit America, a non-profit dedicated to helping middle skill workers chart a path toward skilled technology careers. It’s part of its Career Choice initiative which aims to help prepare hourly employees for career opportunities in tech fields. Amazon employees can now take advantage of Merit America's training programs, which pair job-focused online learning with career coaching and mentorship. 

"The mass displacement of workers that has resulted from the pandemic represents an unprecedented opportunity -- and responsibility -- to reimagine training and hiring, and ensure that the most vulnerable Americans don't get left behind," said Rebecca Taber, Founder and co-CEO of Merit America. "This program reflects Amazon's commitment to investing in its people -- in ways that can not only close critical near-term skill gaps, but also create opportunities for their employees in the long term."

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Source:  HR Exchange Network

https://www.hrexchangenetwork.com/hr-talent-management/articles/the-art-of-career-mapping-hrs-guide-to-reskilling-the-workforce

ROBERT SHEEN  |  JUNE 19, 2020

This time last year was presumed to be the last time health insurers and employers offering self-funded health insurance plans would have to pay PCORI fees, but things change.

The PCORI fees were set to expire for plans ending before October 1, 2019 but when the Trump administration signed the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2020 into law, PCORI and the associated fees were extended through September 30, 2029.

As a result, health insurers and plan sponsors offering self-funded health insurance plans will need to continue to pay the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Trust Fund Fee via Form 720 by July 31 annually. The fee will need to be paid using the Electronic Federal Tax Systems (EFTPS).

For policy and plan years that end on or after October 1, 2019 and before October 1, 2020, the applicable dollar amount per covered individual is $2.54.

The PCORI fee is calculated off the average number of lives covered during the policy year. That means that all parties enrolled will have to be accounted for such as dependents, spouses, retirees, and COBRA beneficiaries.

The final regulations specify that the PCORI fees also apply to short-term plans of applicable self-insured health plans; that is, plans that run shorter than 12 months in duration. The only exceptions for paying PCORI fees apply to governmental programs and programs established by federal law for providing medical care.

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Trust Fund fee is a fee on issuers of specified health insurance policies and plan sponsors of applicable self-insured health plans that helps to fund the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), which was established by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The institute assists, through research, patients, clinicians, purchasers and policy-makers in making informed health decisions by advancing the quality and relevance of evidence-based medicine. The institute compiles and distributes comparative clinical effectiveness research findings.

For more information from the IRS on the PCORI fee, click here.

If your organization is subject to the PCORI fees, make sure you get your information in before July 31 as failure to pay the fee could result in IRS penalties. Since the PCORI fee is considered an excise tax, it is calculated under IRC 6651. Some third-party organizations may include PCORI coordination as a part of their ACA compliance service at no extra charge.

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Source: The ACA Times

https://acatimes.com/the-aca-pcori-fee-deadline-is-fast-approaching/

The Supreme Court is leaving in place a decision that employers can’t use past salary history to justify a pay disparity between male and female employees

By: The Associated Press | July 2, 2020, 6:56 AM

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court is leaving in place a decision that employers can't use past salary history to justify a pay disparity between male and female employees.

The court on Thursday declined to take up a case from the California-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Judges there said the federal Equal Pay Act, which generally requires men and women to be paid equally for the same work, doesn't allow past salary history to be used as justification for a pay disparity. As is usual, the justices did not explain their decision declining to take the case.

The case the justices turned away involved a Fresno County public school math consultant who sued after learning she made less than male colleagues. Aileen Rizo challenged the school system’s policy that based all new employees’ salaries on their prior salaries. The school system argued the policy didn’t favor men or women. California law has since changed so that employers can't use a person's salary history in determining their starting salary. A total of 18 states bar employers from using prior salary information to set a new salary.

The case had been to the Supreme Court once before. The justices sent it back to the Ninth Circuit last year for review because a decision in the case had been written by Appeals Court Judge Stephen Reinhardt but was released 11 days after his death on March 29, 2018.

The justices said in an unsigned opinion at the time that judges can't rule from beyond the grave. “Federal judges are appointed for life, not for eternity,” the opinion said.

After a new judge was appointed to replace Reinhardt, the Ninth Circuit issued a new majority opinion that reached the same result.

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Source: ABC News

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/supreme-court-declines-hear-equal-pay-act-case-71575533

AUTHOR: Katie Clarey | PUBLISHED: July 6, 2020

Dive Brief:

• A class of Bed Bath & Beyond workers could not prove the store underpaid overtime by calculating their compensation with the fluctuating workweek (FWW) method, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled (Thomas, et al. v. Bed Bath & Beyond Inc., No. 19-1647 (2nd Cir. June 15, 2020)).
• The workers argued that, to be paid by the FWW method, their hours needed to "both fall below and rise above the [Fair Labor Standards Act] non-overtime limit of 40 hours with some frequency," and that theirs generally did not fall below 40. The appeals court called this argument "unavailing," noting earlier U.S. Supreme Court rulings on the topic contain "no internal principle for imposing such a limitation."
• Employers may use the FWW method to calculate overtime, the court said, so long as they satisfy two requirements: 1) Employees receive a weekly rate "that is truly fixed and guaranteed; and 2) Employers and employees "come to a clear mutual understanding regarding the FWW method."

Dive Insight:

Bed Bath & Beyond compensated workers involved in the lawsuit using the FWW method, regulations regarding which the U.S. Department of Labor updated late May. This method allows employers to pay non-exempt employees with fluctuating hours a fixed salary that compensates them for all work each week.

When workers put in less than 40 hours, they're paid the fixed salary. When they put in more than 40 hours, necessitating overtime, employers determine their regular rate by "dividing the number of hours worked in the workweek into the amount of the salary." They then pay workers at least one-half of the regular rate in addition to the salary, the agency says in guidance.

The 2nd Circuit's ruling has several clear takeaways, including that employers must communicate to employees paid by the FWW method how they are compensated, Seyfarth Shaw attorneys wrote in a blog post.

Employers ought to explain to FWW-paid workers in writing that their fixed salary is "intended to compensate them for all hours worked in any week and that their overtime premium rate will be at half the effective hourly rate of their salary that week based on their actual hours worked." It's also important, as this case demonstrates, that employees understand that their actual hours will fluctuate based on business needs, even if their scheduled hours do not change drastically, the attorneys wrote.

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Source: HR Dive

https://www.hrdive.com/news/2nd-cir-workers-hours-need-not-drop-below-40-for-fluctuating-workweek/581058/

 

By Mary Stringini | Published July 1, 2020 

LOS ANGELES - New parents will have more time to care for their child thanks to Senate Bill 83, which took effect in California on Wednesday.

Beginning July 1, 2020, benefits under Paid Family Leave will increase from six weeks to eight weeks.

California's previous law provided employees “who take time off from work to care for a seriously ill family member or to bond with a new child entering the family through birth, adoption, or foster care placement” with partial pay.

The law that took effect Wednesday will “instead provide for wage replacement benefits for up to eight weeks to workers who take time off work to care for a seriously ill family member or to bond with a minor child within one year of birth or placement, as specified.”

California was the first state in the U.S. to implement a paid family leave program. Since then, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia have created similar programs.

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Source: Fox 11

https://www.foxla.com/news/californias-paid-family-leave-program-expands-from-6-to-8-weeks

By Susan Carpenter 
PUBLISHED 3:30 PM ET Jul. 02, 2020 | UPDATED 4:57 PM ET Jul. 02, 2020

California's Employment Development Department is making an additional 20 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits available for individuals affected by COVID-19, the EDD announced Wednesday. The additional benefits are part of something called the Federal-State Extended Duration benefits program, or FED-ED, and are available only during times of prolonged unemployment.

In California, the unemployment rate is currently 16.3 percent, compared to 11.1 percent nationally.

What You Need To Know

• California is making an additional 20 weeks of unemployment insurance available to those affected by COVID-19
• 
  
• Eligible claimants will be automatically enrolled in the extension
• 
  
• Claimants must continue to fill out biweekly certifications of their eligibility
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• California's unemployment rate is 16.3 percent, compared with 11.1 percent nationally

The additional benefits are possible because of a new budget package California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Monday, which makes the state eligible for additional unemployment funds from the federal government. 

Individuals hoping to receive the extended benefits need to meet certain eligibility requirements to qualify, however. The EDD states “a claimant must have earnings during the base period (four-quarter period of earnings) of their regular UI claim that exceed 40 times the weekly benefit amount or 1.5 times their highest quarter of total wages during the base period.”

Claimants must remain both able and available for work, as they do to maintain their regular unemployment benefits, according to the EDD. And they may need to accept different work options, including a position that pays less than what they have earned in the past.  

Effective July 1, the extension is being made available at a time when claimants may be running out of their current Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation extension benefits, which already provided an additional 13 weeks of unemployment money. People are eligible for the extension if they continue to be out of work or are working reduced hours.  

The EDD is currently looking through its system to see who is running out of the state’s pandemic benefits to automatically file a FED-ED extension on their behalf. Those individuals will be mailed a notice of eligibility and will need to continue filling out the usual bi-weekly certifications that determine their eligibility for payment.

Those who qualify for the FED-ED extension will receive the extra $600 stimulus payment provided through the federal CARES Act through July 25, 2020.

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Source: Spectrum News

https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/jobs/2020/07/02/california-extends-unemployment-benefits-for-covid