Long Island Employment Law Blog

New York farm workers may want to know about a lawsuit filed in federal court pertaining to sexual harassment. The attorney general of the state of Washington has accused an agricultural company of allowing its female workers to be subjected to extreme and illegal sexual harassment.

During an investigation, authorities found that the harassment included forcing women to engage in sexual relations with a supervisor in order to keep their jobs, asking the female workers for intimate photographs and grabbing and rubbing against female workers against their will. According to the complaint, the company was aware of or should have known that one of its supervisors had committed these acts, which were in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, for years.

New York residents may have heard about a new overtime rule that was set to take effect in December 2016. However, the rule was delayed because of legal challenges, and the Trump administration has asked to push back the deadline to file a legal brief to June 30. If the rule were to take effect, it would raise the salary threshold for exempt workers to $47,476 a year from $23,660.

The original legal challenge to the new rule came from 21 states and was upheld in Nov. 2016 by a Texas judge. The governor of Maine also joined the lawsuit individually as a plaintiff. Before Barack Obama left office, the Department of Labor appealed the Texas ruling, and the case is now pending before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. However, the Trump administration wants more time to prepare its case as their choice for Labor Secretary has yet to be confirmed.

According to a study released on March 21, workplace discrimination in New York and throughout the country may sometimes take subtle forms or may not be immediately recognizable until incidents begin to form a pattern. However, this degree of bias may still be enough to lead to a lawsuit. Researchers identified several different ways in which people were discriminated against at work because of factors such as disability, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation and pregnancy, among others.

Some employees were criticized for qualities or behaviors that would have been desirable in other employees who were young, male or white. Employees also reported managers who seemed intent on finding fault with them. Others said that due to their age, race or other characteristics, they were not considered credible. In some workplaces, coworkers or managers made discriminatory comments about people who were not employees. Some workers tried to claim that discriminatory comments were a joke. Employees were sometimes excluded from social gatherings and meetings or from receiving necessary information.

New York employees who work for church-affiliated organizations might be interested to know that a lawsuit has reached the Supreme Court about whether or not these organizations' pension plans qualify for a religious exemption. This would mean that the plans are exempt from the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974. Lower courts have already unanimously ruled that they are not church plans and thus not exempt because a church does not maintain and did not establish them. Furthermore, employees say that due to the ERISA exemption, the plans are underfunded.

Around 1 million employees at three hospitals will be affected by the decision. If the ruling is not in the hospitals' favor, they may owe employee billions of dollars in penalties.