Last week, the Legislative Program Review and Investigations Committee released a 129-page report on the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities, with a focus on Discrimination Complaint Processing. You can download it here.
The report is worth a deep dive at another time, and a final report from the Committee is due in January 2017.
Payroll cards are finally here.
The General Assembly finished their regular session last night with several employment law bills getting passed, including some that have been kicking around for years.
One of them is Senate Bill 211, which authorizes employers to use payroll cards — instead of checks or direct deposit — to pay their
So last week I provided a recap of a few of the labor & employment law bills still being kicked around the legislature. From talking with a few folks in on the process, here are some other bills to keep an eye on (whether in this original form or as an amendment to an existing
The 2016 Connecticut General Assembly is about one month from ending its term so it’s a good opportunity to see what bills are still floating out there.
I’ll do a bigger recap when we get close to the end of the session but if you have any interest in the bills (and, if you’re an
The Connecticut General Assembly is finalizing its budget implementation bill today and suffice to say that there are more than a few surprises in there. (CT News Junkie first highlighted it in a tweet, it should be noted.)
For employers, buried deep in the bill is Section 422 entitled: “PAID FAMILY AND
The dust has finally settled from the close of the Connecticut General Assembly on Wednesday. And it’s time to take a look at the last few days to see what employment law bills passed.
(I’ll tackle the changes that have been made to the CHRO in a post later today.)
As I’ve noted in
The Connecticut General Assembly is winding down in the next eight days, but not before some very significant legislation gets a thumbs up or down.
As discussed before, the legislature has already passed a bill expanding an employee’s online privacy interests. That bill was signed by the governor on May 19th. It goes into
As I said before, the notion that this might be a quiet year for employment law legislation at the Connecticut General Assembly has long since left the train station.
Indeed, we’ve appear to be swinging completely in the opposite direction. Anything and everything appears up discussion and possible passage this year — including items that really stood no chance in prior years.
I’ll leave it for the political pundits to analyze the why and the politics of it all. But for employers, some of these proposals are going to be very challenging, at best, if passed.
One such bill, which appeared this week on the “GO” list (meaning its ready for considering by both houses) is House Bill 6850, titled “An Act on Pay Equity and Fairness”. Of course, you won’t find those words in the bill itself which is odd. There is nothing about pay equity in the bill; indeed, it is much much broader than that.
It stands in contrast to, say, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which tried to tackle gender discrimination in pay directly.
This bill would make it illegal for employers to do three things. If passed, no employer (no matter how big or small) could:
You might be wondering: Isn’t this first bill duplicative of federal law? And the answer is yes, and then it goes beyond it. Federal labor law (the National Labor Relations Act) already protects two or more employees discussing improving their pay as a “protected concerted activity”. It’s been on the books for nearly 80 years. So, as noted in an NPR article:
Under a nearly 80-year-old federal labor law, employees already can talk about their salaries at work, and employers are generally prohibited from imposing “pay secrecy” policies, whether or not they do business with the federal government.
This provision goes beyond that by making it improper for an employer to prohibit an employee from even disclosing another employee’s pay.Continue Reading “Pay Secrecy” Bill Goes Above and Beyond Other Proposals
Well, no one who has been reading this blog should be surprised by the news tonight out of the General Assembly.
Indeed, I’ve written about proposed bills that limit employer access to employee’s personal online account for years now with a lot back in 2013. (See prior posts here, here, here
When I made predictions/wishes for 2015 at the end of last year, I offered up one on what the Connecticut General Assembly might do:
My Prediction: We’ll see a new rule or two, but with all the mandates that have been passed in the last four years, I expect there to be more bluster