Stay Up To Date

This is the second installment in our roundup of FFCRA complaints. As we noted in the first post, we will be keeping you up to date with all the cases and highlighting the ones that we think have special bearing on our practice, employment law in New York State, or are just particularly noteworthy.

Since the end of March, we’ve spent a great deal of time talking about the economic and social impacts of coronavirus and the lockdowns on working parents, but today we want to talk about how it’s affecting pregnancy. Specifically, what is and isn’t being done to help pregnant women during this incredibly strange and new time.

In this edition, we’re looking at several employment-related stories, including more news on the childcare front, new considerations for coronavirus workplace safety, as well as some news about a project in which the Firm is participating.

In a stunning victory for LGBT employees and the movement at large, the U.S. Supreme Court has held 6-3 that gay and transgender people are protected by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans employment discrimination “because of sex.”

As part of our ongoing coverage of how coronavirus is affecting workplace conditions and employment rights, we are providing a weekly summary of complaints filed to challenge alleged FFCRA violations.

This week we’re highlighting several important developments regarding a return to work and the continued federal failure to properly address workplace safety, as well as more news on the childcare front, and a thoughtful consideration about how the global pandemic could get people thinking about family values in a new light.

As the remote school year comes to a close and with summer camp plans still in flux, many parents and caregivers will soon be struggling to find childcare solutions and wondering whether they can use paid leave to care for their children through the summer months, and whether they may continue to telework even if their workplace reopens.

Woven Bodies, an inclusive digital practice supporting queer folks + allies from family planning through parenthood hosted Associate Alex Berke to offer training on Paid Family Leave.

This week we’re looking at the opportunity coronavirus has provided to rethink care structures in the US, the disproportionate impact lockdowns have had on black communities, and ballooning unemployment numbers for women over 55.

This week, the Center for American Progress released a new report titled “Valuing Women’s Caregiving During and After the Coronavirus Crisis” which highlights the need to support caregivers during the crisis, but also to think about medium- and long-term strategies to ensure that this does not result in a long-term crisis within childcare.

This week, the New York Times reports that the temporary setbacks to gender parity in the workplace are in danger of being close to permanent, leaving a whole generation of women behind their male cohort in the workplace. There has been a decade of fragile progress since the Great Recession, and in February, women represented a majority of civilian, non-farm workers employed in the country.

Under new Occupational Safety and Health Administration (“OSHA”) guidance, moving forward employers must now investigate how any Covid-19 positive employees may have contracted the virus. If the cause of the infection was likely work-related, the employer must record it as an “occupational illness.”