In preparation for a webinar I gave this week with my colleague Chris Engler (which, by the way, you can access here) I took a deeper dive into the statistics from the annual report released by the CHRO, in a followup to my initial report here.
When you look at the numbers in
If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you know that this is my absolute favorite time of the year.
No, it’s not Thanksgiving (though we should give thanks as I’ll explain in a second). But rather, it’s the release of the Annual Case Processing Report from the CHRO!
Yes, we should give thanks to
Yesterday I had the opportunity (along with my fellow Shipman & Goodwin partner Peter Murphy) to speak as part of the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities’ (CHRO) 75th Anniversary celebration.
The panel — The Barriers to Employment Legal Update and Panel Discussion — was chock full of the types of insights, data and
Cars. Lots of really fancy cars.
That about sums up my Sunday in which I went to the Concorso Ferrari & Friends car event in West Hartford Center. It has one of the biggest collections of ultra-expensive cars in the state — all to benefit the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center.
What I wouldn’t do to
This post is for the employment law nerds out there.
You know who you are.
You pore over the statistics that show a correlation between the unemployment rate and EEOC filings. (I see you Lawffice Space.)
You rate who the “Worst Employer” is of 2017. (Can’t wait for the announcement next week, Ohio
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to sit on a panel discussion sponsored by the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities. Charles Krich, a Principal Attorney, also spoke and it was moderated by Deputy Director Cheryl Sharp.
The purpose of the discussion, before dozens of practitioners in the state, was to look at the state
If you don’t have plans this afternoon, I recommend joining me over at a panel discussion at the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities headquarters in downtown Hartford.
There, the CHRO will be holding an informational session for attorneys to discuss its practices and procedures. As described by the CHRO:
The Commission on Human
So in a post earlier on Friday, I recapped most of the employment law legislation that passed — except one. That bill, Senate Bill 446, was titled “AN ACT CONCERNING THE DEFINITION OF THE TERM “DOMESTIC WORKER”.
Innocuous enough, right?
But as it turns out, that bill was used as a cover to pass through significant changes to the CHRO process.
You will see that many of the changes are ones that I had tipped you all on earlier this year. Then back in April, we were told that the bill was “mostly dead”.
But like the Princess Bride, “Miracle Max” worked some magic and the bill came back from the dead during the session’s last week.
And there are so many changes that a separate blog post seemed like the best way to get through it all.
So let’s get to it, shall we?
Overall, the OLR summary of the bill recaps four main areas of change to the CHRO. It:
But it also makes a significant change to the definition of who is an employee:
The bill also brings domestic workers who work for employers with at least three employees under the employment-related anti-discrimination laws administered by CHRO. Among other things, this provides them with (1) protections against employment-related discrimination based on their race, color, religion, age, sex, gender identity, marital status, national origin, ancestry, and mental or physical disability; (2) a right to a reasonable leave of absence for a disability resulting from a pregnancy and other pregnancy-related protections; and (3) protections against sexual harassment. By law, employees covered under the CHRO statutes can enforce their rights by filing a complaint with the commission.
If signed by the governor, the CHRO provisions will go into effect October 1, 2015, while the provisions on domestic workers will become effective January 1, 2016.
In more detail, the bill makes several changes to the CHRO process.
Responding to the Complaint
Continue Reading Back from the Dead: Procedural Changes Coming to CHRO and New Protections for Domestic Workers
Last year, the General Assembly considered changes to the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities. That bill did not receive a final vote. This year, it’s back but recently died in the Judiciary Committee, according to the CBIA. Will it get attached to another bill? Will it be tweaked further this fall in preparation for next year’s term? My colleague, Christopher Parkin, chimes in with the details and why employers need to keep an eye on any proposed changes.
The ink is still drying on the most recent round of changes at the CHRO, the massive amendments known as PA 11-237 (in fact, the CHRO website still points to old versions of the General Statutes), but the legislature has been grappling with proposed changes to the statutes that govern the CHRO in the last few months.
These amendments, Senate Bill 385, represent a considerable effort to clean up antiquated language and recodify the statutes to make them more accessible to the public.
Among the hundreds of technical amendments built into the bill are plenty of new substantive changes that employers and their counsel will need to become familiar with. Recently the CBIA has noted that this particular effort has seemed to die in committee; however, the bill is likely to reappear at one point or another. Here are the details and the impact on employers when this is considered again.
Investigator and mediator will no longer be the same person
The CHRO has long been criticized for its practice of combining the mediation and investigation process by assigning a single investigator to handle both duties, a process the Commission has insisted is a function of insufficient funding. Until recently, mediations and fact findings were very frequently held consecutively in one marathon day.
Nobody is best served when these processes are combined. Neither employers nor employees can fully trust the confidentiality of the mediation process when the mediator will be tasked with soliciting testimony a few hours later if the case doesn’t settle.
It’s also not fair to the investigators to expect that they can fully partition their brain between mediation and investigation to conduct both appropriately.
Continue Reading A New “CAR” And Other Proposed Changes to CHRO – Can They Get It Right?
You might have missed it, but earlier this month, significant new restrictions when into place that govern when the driver of a car can use his or her cell phone.
Previously, Connecticut’s law restricting cell phone use by drivers was limited to times when