Labor & Employment Law Update

With COVID-19 cases surging in numbers, the legal implications of face mask policies for businesses have taken center stage again. 

First a quick recap, from my prior article, ADA Implications, I Don’t Want To Wear a Mask…:

• Businesses can require employees to wear masks at work and customers to wear face masks when coming into businesses;
• Businesses can refuse entry or ask customers to leave if they refuse to wear a face mask;
• For both employees and customers that say they cannot wear a face mask due to a disability or medical condition, the business must engage in the ADA interactive ...

In a decision issued yesterday, General Motors LLC, 369 NLRB No. 12 (2020) , the National Labor Relations Board declared that “[it] will no longer stand in the way of employers’ legal obligation to take prompt and appropriate corrective action to avoid a hostile work environment on the basis of protected characteristics.”

Prior to yesterday’s decision, employees who engaged in obscene, racist, and sexually harassing speech in the course of activity otherwise protected by the NLRA, were protected by various setting-specific standards that provided leeway to ...

On July 8, 2020 the United States Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. civil rights laws barring discrimination on the job do not apply to most lay teachers at religious elementary schools. The decision extends earlier Supreme Court rulings that shielded religious organizations from employment-discrimination claims by ministers, called the “ministerial exception.” This principle, which courts derived from the First Amendment, bars the government from telling a religious institution whom to choose as its faith leaders. Respecting that principle sometimes requires the ...

As has come to be expected, the guidance regarding COVID-19 has changed again. This time the CDC narrowed the definition of who constitutes a “close contact” for purposes of tracing people with potential exposure to someone who has COVID-19.

While a “close contact” is still defined as someone who was within 6 feet of an infected person for at least 15 minutes, what has changed is when the exposure occurred during the ill person’s sickness. The relevant time is now from two days before illness onset (or, for asymptomatic patients, two days prior to specimen collection ...