Back in 2021, a change to the state’s unemployment compensation law might have been overlooked. After all, the provisions didn’t go into effect until January 1, 2024.

Alas, the time is now for employers to pay attention.

The state Department of Labor has a whole list of all the changes going into effect but I

Since the start of the year, a whole bunch of tech firms have been going through a series of layoffs. The New York Times recently did an article about how such layoffs were “shocking” to a whole generation of workers typically Millennials and Generation Z who had never experienced such change before. (Generation X and

Lately, I’ve been talking with more employers about permanent reductions in force.

It’s not fun.

And it’s not something I thought we’d be talking about 3 months ago, and yet it’s not foreign to me either.

In fact, I spent several of my earliest posts here on this exact topic. 

As I talk with employers

Employers that have been receiving loans under the Paycheck Protection Program from the CARES Act have a lot to think about to make sure that the loan is forgiven.

One key aspect is that the borrower/employer must spend 75 percent of the loan proceeds on payroll.

That becomes challenging when employees have been furloughed or

Yesterday, my colleague Peter Murphy and I set out to write a summary of one of Connecticut’s quiet success stories during this pandemic — the Shared Work program from the Connecticut Department of Labor.

You can find the entire article here.

What is this little program that has served an outsized role the last few

As if the pandemic weren’t disorienting enough, the rules and guidance surrounding unemployment compensation feels as if it keeps changing too.

While that’s not entirely accurate — Connecticut’s rules are basically unchanged though some of the application of those rules have been tweaked — the new CARES Act has added a layer of complexity that

This pandemic is exhausting.

There’s obviously the personal: The “work from home” novelty has worn off and now comes to tough part of trying to find the boundaries of work and home.  Each day feels like it is 16 hours long (maybe because it is sometimes).

Then there’s the professional: We’ve continued to see clients

Without any fanfare, the Connecticut Department of Labor has recently updated their separation packets, that include the so-called “Pink Slips”.

Employers must start using this packet immediately on a going-forward basis.

Previously, there was a category of “layoff” but the new form has eliminated that checkbox, and replaced it with “leave of absence”.  This

Thursday brought still another busy day of news as increased testing in Connecticut brought a big jump in numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases. 

We’re starting to hear about employers considering furloughing employees instead of simply laying them off.

(Though the numbers of layoffs in Connecticut is over 54,000 — since Friday.)

In general terms, a