Shulman Kessler LLP Blog

About 1.1 million workers throughout New York and the rest of the country would qualify to receive overtime time pay if a new rule proposed by the Department of Labor is implemented. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to pay workers overtime when they work more than 40 hours in a workweek, but the landmark 1938 law does not cover all employees. Managers, commissioned salespeople and workers who earn over a certain amount are not entitled to overtime under the FLSA.

The current income cap for non-management workers to qualify for overtime pay is $23,660. This figure was set in 2004. The rule proposed by the DOL would raise this cap to $35,308. An effort was made to raise the income cap to $47,476 during the Obama administration, but a federal judge blocked the change just days before it was scheduled to go into effect. Had it not been blocked, the Obama-era change would have extended overtime coverage to about 4.2 million workers.

Employee discrimination can come in multiple forms that the general populace isn't aware about for a long time. More employers get away with their unfair business practices the longer the public doesn't know about the issue at hand. These are why lawsuits and newer laws are important as they can influence an employer's actions and make more people realize how fair workplaces should operate.

Earlier this month, the NYC Commission on Human Rights announced that the city had new guidelines regarding hair discrimination. These new regulations allow for more freedom in the workplace for employees to express themselves with their hairstyles without potentially losing their job in the process.

The technology giant Google announced on Feb. 21 that that would no longer prevent its employees from joining together to file class-action lawsuits against the company over workplace issues. Google workers in New York and around the country will also no longer be required to litigate discrimination and wrongful termination disputes through arbitration. The move is the latest effort by the Mountain View-based company to relax restrictions that prompted widespread worker protests in November.

About 20,000 Google workers around the world walked out of their offices after it was revealed that the company had given a former executive an exit package worth approximately $90 million. Employees reacted angrily to the news because the executive had been implicated in a sexual harassment scandal. The workers called for an end to mandatory arbitration because the sessions take place behind closed doors. This, according to the workers, leads to serious workplace issues being buried or ignored instead of confronted and resolved.

Given the fact that about a third of America's working force will be above the age of 50 by 2022, the state of New York included, ageism and age discrimination in the workplace are serious matters that need to be tackled head-on. To make matters worse, age discrimination is so prevalent in today's workplace that, according to some estimates, six out of every ten employees above the age of 45 have been exposed to it in some way or form, and nine out of every ten senior employees describe ageism as a common practice in today's workplace.

That being said, age discrimination can be tricky to prove. For one thing, it tends to take many forms, such as derisive comments pertaining to someone else's appearance, derogatory remarks about an individual's declining cognitive abilities, and overlooking qualified workers when it is time to promote them. Over and above, age discrimination can be even tougher to prove when a company is hiring: After all, a company may claim that it rejected an elderly candidate for a host of other 'reasons", none of which had anything to do with their age. In fact, some companies will send subtle signals that they'd prefer to hire younger candidates, including asking for a candidate's high school graduation date and asserting that their workplace is a 'fun" and 'hip" place to work.