Employment Law Blog

One of the maddening things for employee advocates is how rules developed by the courts for one set of facts are used to swat down a case involving an entirely different set of facts. The First Circuit holds that's exactly what happened here, and reverses summary judgment when a judge used a standard developed for failure-to-hire cases to prematurely dismiss a forcible-transfer case.

A Black employee who is denied a transfer and told by her supervisor that another manager "wanted a Korean in that position" - and is then fired a week after complaining about race discrimination - presents a triable case of Title VII discrimination and retaliation, so holds the Eleventh Circuit.

An employee fired during her pregnancy should get a Title VII trial, holds the Tenth Circuit, where one of the putative decision-makers reportedly told the plaintiff "[w]hat, you're pregnant too?," and said "I don't know how I'm going to be able to handle all of these people being pregnant at once" and "I have too many pregnant workers, I don't know what I am going to do with all of them."

In late March, the Trump administration backed off from a proposal that would have effectively given restaurants and other employers the legal right to pocket workers' tips. The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) announced the proposed rule change last December, saying it would give employers the "freedom to share tips between traditionally tipped and non-tipped workers." It would have rolled back regulations introduced in 2011 by the Obama administration that barred employers from redistributing tips to anyone other than the employees who would normally receive them.

Too often, however, tip-pooling with non-tipped workers becomes wage theft when employers use it as a way to redirect tips to themselves. In the case of the DOL proposal, managers, supervisors and even business owners would have been legally entitled to receive a portion of workers' tips.

Thankfully, the backlash that erupted in response to the proposed change forced the DOL to reconsider the proposal and, ultimately, put forward amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) that better protect tipped workers.