Connecticut Employment Lawyer & Attorney : Daniel Schwartz : Stamford, Hartford New Haven, CT

With one month to go in the shortened legislative session, there hasn't been a lot of action on various labor & employment bills.  Many of the bills I highlighted in the last two months haven't seen a lot of action or are still awaiting further votes.  This post will briefly summarize where some of the bills are based on the Bill Record Book. 

• The Workplace Bullying bill, Senate Bill 60, which I addressed here, appears to be going nowhere. There has been no committee action on it, unlike several others.  In my opinion, there are just too many issues that would need to be resolved and addressed to make the proposed bill a workable law. 
  
• Similarly, Senate Bill 61, which provides additional protections to whistleblowers hasn't gone anywhere yet either.  There has yet to be a hearing on it and no action appears to have been taken on it.  Some of my prior coverage is available here.
  
• On a different note, the bill to allow 15 year olds back into grocery stores, Senate Bill 216, passed the Senate last week.  This one seems like a sure thing to get House approval. For more background on this bill, click here for my prior coverage. 
  
• The Paid Sick Leave Bill, Senate Bill 217, is far from sick. I covered the bill's origins here.  Indeed, the Labor & Public Employee Committee has favorably voted the bill out to the Judiciary Committee on April 3, 2008.  

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The General Assembly's Labor & Public Employee Hearing on various labor bills went forward as scheduled on Tuesday.  Among the topics --  the workplace bullying bill that I first reported on on Monday.

Senate Bill 60 would create a private cause of action for workplace bullying. However, even if the bill passes the labor committee, it would still need to pass muster with the judiciary committee, according to state Senator Edith Prague.

The Hartford Courant had a report in Wednesday's editions:

The bill, which has the support of committee chair state Sen. Edith Prague, D-Columbia, is actually a revised version of a similar bill that failed to reach a full vote of the assembly last year because of concerns about how it might affect businesses. In particular, opponents worried that the bill, which would allow workplace bullying victims to sue their tormentors, could expose employers to potential damages even if they had consistently tried to create a safe environment for workers.

The new legislation aims to protect employers who have acted in good faith by making them exempt from liability if they can show they took steps to prevent bullying behavior on the part of individual employees or supervisors.

Last week, The Word on Employment Law discussed the possibility that these types of bills were being introduced across the United States.  Earlier this month, Ohio Employer's Law Blog touched the subject as well.  But for a more in-depth look at the subject, the ABA Journal did a nice piece earlier this month. The article quotes from a Tennessee case that perhaps touches on the problem with workplace bullying laws and perhaps over-legislating the workplace. 

The fact that a supervisor is mean, hard to get along with, overbearing, belligerent or otherwise hostile and abusive, does not violate civil rights statutes...

It'll be interesting to see what happens with this bill in the upcoming months. And for the record, i don't think hiring bodyguards for the workplace, as the movie poster suggests, is a good idea.  Stay tuned.

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