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It’s been an active legislative session in Oregon this year regarding laws affecting the state’s employers.  Hot on the heels of enacting laws relating to paid sick leave, noncompete agreements, and employee privacy on social media, Governor Kate Brown also recently signed into law House Bill 3025.  That law will make …

Governor Kate Brown signed into law the new Oregon Paid Sick Leave (“OPSL”) law enacted by the Legislature on June 12. The new law becomes effective January 1, 2016. Oregon is the fourth state to enact a state-wide paid sick leave law after Massachusetts, Connecticut, and California. The text of the OPSL is available here.

The OPSL will look familiar to Oregon employers that have already been dealing with local PSL ordinances enacted in Portland and Eugene in recent years, which OPSL now preempts and replaces. OPSL largely tracks those local leave laws in substance, and generally requires employers to provide up to 40 hours of sick leave per year. Here is a detailed summary of its requirements, including where it differs from the Portland and Eugene ordinances.
Continue Reading Oregon Enacts State-Wide Paid Employee Sick Leave Which (Mostly) Replaces Local Ordinances in Portland and Eugene

As we noted a while ago, Oregon recently joined the growing number of states that prohibit an employer from demanding access to an employee’s personal social media account. An Oregon employer may not require an employee or applicant to disclose her username, password, or “other means of authentication that provides access to a personal social media account.” Neither may an employer require an employee or applicant to friend, follow, or otherwise connect with it via a social media account, or to permit the employer to “shoulder surf” while the employee is logged in. There are exceptions—business-related social media accounts and workplace investigations are notable ones—but the rule is fairly clear: When it comes to employees’ personal social media accounts, it’s probably best for an employer to keep its distance.

Seems simple enough, right? Maybe, but here in Oregon, we like not to be outdone by our neighbors. So, last week, Governor Kate Brown signed Senate Bill 185, which adds a few interesting tweaks to the “model” approach that most other states (including Oregon) have followed when adopting social media protections for employees.Continue Reading Oregon Legislature to Employers: Stay Out of Employees’ Personal Social Media Accounts!

1790100On July 3, 2015, the San Francisco Retail Workers Bill of Rights becomes operative. This ordinance creates major changes for many companies doing business in San Francisco.

Employers Affected

The law applies to “formula retail” businesses with (a) 20 or more locations worldwide, and (b) 20 or more employees in San Francisco, as well as their janitorial and security contractors. Pending amendments to the law, if passed, would change from 20 to 40 the number of retail establishments worldwide for a formula retail business to be covered by the law.

A “formula retail” business is any business that maintains two or more of the following features:

  • Standardized array of merchandise
  • Standardized façade
  • Standardized décor and color scheme
  • Uniform apparel
  • Standardized signage
  • Trademark or service mark

Requirements

1.  Advance Notice of Work Schedule

Employers must provide new employees with a good-faith initial estimate of the number of scheduled shifts the employee will receive each month, along with the days and hours the shifts will occur.

Employers must also provide employees with their schedules two weeks in advance. Schedules may be posted in the workplace or provided electronically, so long as employees are given access to the electronic schedules at work. If the posted schedule is changed, the employer must notify the employee of the change by in-person conversation, phone call, email, text message, or other electronic communication.  This requirement doesn’t apply if the employee requested the change.
Continue Reading San Francisco Is About to Begin Enforcing the Retail Workers Bill of Rights – Are You in Compliance?

As we have previously reported here and here, the National Labor Relations Board’s (“NLRB”) new rules governing union representation elections go into effect today, April 14, 2015. Congress passed a resolution disapproving the new “quickie” or “ambush” rules, but President Obama vetoed it. While lawsuits have been filed in Texas and the District of Columbia challenging the new rules, at this point no court has halted their implementation. Thus, absent late-breaking developments, employers need to be prepared for this brave new world.

Under the new rules, elections will be expedited. Disputes over the unit selected by the union will be resolved in a hearing normally scheduled for no more than eight days after the filing of the petition. Moreover, the employer must identify all of its concerns with the group of employees targeted by the union in a “statement of position” filed the day before the hearing, or those arguments will be waived. Excelsior lists must be provided more quickly, and elections will be held within 10 to 25 days after the filing of the petition.

The bottom line: by design, employers will not have adequate time to prepare a campaign to educate their employees about the issues that will arise if they vote for union representation. Thus, it is imperative that all employers evaluate their risks of union organizing activity, and do what you can now to prepare ahead of time.
Continue Reading Are You Ready to be Ambushed? NLRB’s New “Quickie Election” Rules Become Effective

Utah legislators made national headlines last night when they approved a bill providing antidiscrimination protections to LGBT employees coupled with protections for religious expression in the workplace. Titled the Utah Antidiscrimination and Religious Freedom Act (the “Act”), the bill received support from across Utah’s political spectrum, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the ACLU of Utah, and some of Utah’s leading LGBT advocacy groups. Utah Governor Gary Herbert has pledged to sign the bill into law later today.

The bill could serve as a template for other so-called “Red States” also seeking to balance concerns about religious liberty and expression with the need for workplace antidiscrimination protections for LGBT employees. Our objective in this article is to describe how the new law will impact Utah employers, their obligations under the Act, who is protected and who is exempt, and how the law’s religious belief protections for employees are meant to apply.
Continue Reading Utah Legislators Make History, Pass LGBT Antidiscrimination/Religious Freedom Bill

Thumbs upAllow us to pat ourselves on the back for a moment.  Prognosticating from 2013 into the future, we accurately predicted that in 2014 the Seattle Seahawks would win the Super Bowl and that the public would continue to strongly support minimum wage increases and paid sick leave laws.  (Please politely ignore our Portland Trailblazers NBA championship prediction.)

This year voters in five states overwhelmingly supported an increased minimum wage, while voters in Massachusetts and three New Jersey and California cities adopted paid sick leave.  These states and cities join a growing trend of support for “living wages” and paid sick leave laws.  Earlier this year, for instance, Seattle approved a minimum wage of $15 per hour, while Portland implemented its paid sick leave law and California became the second of now three states to give its employees paid sick leave on a statewide basis (see our posts on Portland’s law here, and California’s law).Continue Reading Nostradamus, Minimum Wage, and Paid Sick Leave