August 11, 2020

New York State Human Rights Law Invoked in Sexual Harassment Arbitration Case

A split has appeared in how to handle sexual harassment cases with a New York trial judge ruling recently that the state’s Human Rights Law prevents companies and employees from entering arbitration over sexual harassment. This contradicts an earlier ruling in New York’s Southern District where a judge ruled that arbitration under the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) supersedes New York’s statutory prohibition against arbitration. 

There is a useful summary of the most recent decision at Mintz, but the quick takeaways are that when statutory law changed in 2018, which allowed plaintiffs to seek relief in court rather than through arbitration, employers, even those who had previous employment agreements that stipulated arbitration, were arguably no longer able to seek arbitration under the FAA laws; furthermore, the judge argued that any mandatory arbitration clauses were invalidated by the new state law. 

Confounding matters further, in February another trial judge in New York ruled that changes in the law do not invalidate previous arbitration agreements. At the moment, it remains unclear whether employers’ mandatory arbitration clauses regarding sexual harassment complaints are valid any longer. As there are sure to be appeals, this is a case we will be watching.

Employees Push Back at Tech Companies for Giving Parents too Much

September 11, 2020
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It might seem like vanilla stuff for some of the world’s almost capitalized companies in the world to provide extra support to employees during a global pandemic, but not so at companies like Facebook and Twitter, where a rift has formed between parents, non-parents and employers over the companies’ policy responses to daycare and school closures.

This Week in FFCRA Complaints: Dismissals While Seeking Paid Leave

September 11, 2020
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It appears employers continue to terminate workers who are supposed to be protected under the FFCRA. This week, we’ve highlighted several cases where employees were waiting for test results or already diagnosed with Covid-19 and subsequently fired when seeking paid leave.

The Berke-Weiss Law Weekly Roundup: A nurse fights for safer workplaces

September 8, 2020
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There was some decent news this week in the employment outlook, depending on how you look at it. The positive is that roughly 1.37 million jobs were added this week and the unemployment rate dropped to 8.4 percent. The negative is that nearly 20 million Americans remain unemployed and of those 1.37 million jobs added over 230,000 hires are census workers, who will be out of a job shortly.

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