Tag Archives: Federal Employment Law

All Employers Required to Send ACA Notice By October 1, 2013

Benefits

As an employer, you have a deadline quickly approaching. You are required to send a notice to all of your employees about the marketplace exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act. You can find the model notices at https://dol.gov/ebsa/healthreform. There is a model notice for those employers who provide group health insurance and a separate model notice for those employers who do not provide group health insurance. There are Spanish versions of both of those notices available on that same DOL website page.

This notice is required of all employers who are subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act (overtime and minimum wage law), regardless of how many employees you have and regardless of whether you offer health insurance or not.

You must provide this notice to all of your employees, even those who are not eligible for your group health insurance and those who are not enrolled in your plan.

The deadline for providing this notice to your current employees is October 1, 2013. Anyone you hire after that time must receive the notice within 14 days of employment. You may provide the notices by mail, or you can use e-mail to notify those employees who regularly have access to a work e-mail address.

For those employers who offer health insurance, the Model Notice has a page three that asks about the specifics of your health insurance plan. It is optional as to whether you as an employer answer the questions asked on page three. Because of the uncertainties of the health insurance market right now and the probability that many of you will be offered a renewal in December 2013 that will change this information, I suggest that those of you who offer a group health plan do not answer any of the questions on page three of this notice at this time.

Employers Face Obesity Discrimination Issues

Discrimination, Employee Rights, Hiring, Medical, , , ,

In June, the AMA recognized obesity as a disease, instead of just an issue of poor judgment. As an employer, you now have to think about obesity in terms of the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”). To be protected under the ADA, an employer must have a physical or mental impairment that affects a major life activity, such as walking or bending, or affects a major bodily function, such as the cardiovascular system. In addition, the ADA protects people who are “regarded as” having a disability, even if they don’t.

With the AMA’s decision as ammunition, you as an employer are now in the crosshairs of many more disability claims because the Centers for Disease Control says 35.9% of American adults over 20 are obese. We don’t know all the ramifications yet, but it is reasonable to assume that the AMA’s label will eventually change your legal obligations.

As an employer, you are going to need address the obesity of your employees in three ways:

  1. You must not discriminate against obese applicants or employees by treating them adversely in hiring, promotions, discharge, compensation, job training, or other terms and conditions of employment. Appearance discrimination hasn’t found much support in the courts before the AMA’s decision, but this could give that kind of claim new life. This means that the overweight applicant who you fear will have absenteeism problems because of health issues cannot be excluded on that basis from hiring consideration. Also, that obese employee who you have consistently passed over for a promotion because you think he is lazy, or the fat assistant who wants to go into sales but you don’t believe she presents a professional image, may have a discrimination claim against you either because he/she is disabled by obesity or is regarded as such. Finally, when you are firing an employee, you’ll need to have well-documented reasons if obesity could be a claim.
  2. You will have to accommodate an obese employee’s reasonable requests for bigger, more comfortable furniture, more doctor’s visits or additional time to perform certain physical functions at work. As with any disability, you will have to handle these requests with discretion and sensitivity. I imagine that public theaters, airplanes and stadiums will also have to address this issue of whether they will have to provide larger seats.
  3. You must prevent harassment based on a person’s disability. That means that fat jokes will have to be tamped down just as you would racial or religious slurs to prevent a hostile work environment.

At a time when some parts of the federal government (HHS, DOL and IRS) are promoting wellness programs under Obamacare and encouraging employers to adopt programs that reward employees who stop smoking, lower their cholesterol or their BMI, the federal discrimination enforcement agency, the EEOC, is going to be scrutinizing wellness programs that may stigmatize obese employees. As an employer, you are going to need to walk a fine line with your wellness incentives. Heck, just having a motivation poster glorifying skinny people climbing to the top of a mountain may imply a negative stereotype of disabled obese employees.

There are no easy answers to this new issue. The AMA’s decision, by itself, doesn’t carry any legal weight. But it could influence the courts and accelerate the EEOC’s efforts to make appearance a protected class. My advice is to avoid becoming the test case on this issue and just use some care and common sense when dealing with obese employees.

 

PPACA Pay or Play Penalties Delayed

Benefits

You have probably heard the news by now that the Obama administration announced that it is delaying enforcement of one piece of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) for one year. The starting date for the mandate that employers with 50 or more full-time equivalent employees have to offer affordable health insurance to their employees beginning January 1, 2014 or face penalties of $2000-$3000 per employee has been delayed until January 1, 2015. This is a huge relief to many businesses, particularly restaurants, hotels, retail establishments and construction companies, who have not traditionally provided health insurance to all of their employees and were scrambling to try to figure out their strategy for complying with the law without the cost of the benefits putting them out of business. Employers still have to make those tough decisions, but will not do so in as big a rush as they were facing and hopefully will have more guidance in making those decisions.

However, every employer needs to understand that this delay in the pay or play penalties for employers and the reporting by employers of the details of the health coverage that they offer does not mean that many other parts of the PPACA aren’t going to be effective on January 1, 2014. For example, the individual mandate, requiring that every American have health insurance, has not been delayed. This means that every citizen has to have coverage in 2014, but many will not have any insurance offered through their employers on that date. Fortunately, the IRS penalty for a person who doesn’t have health insurance is only $95 for 2014 and won’t increase until after that.

PPACA provisions that are not going to be affected by the delay and will therefore need to be addressed in 2014 by employers who already provide health insurance include the 90-day limit on waiting period for benefits eligibility, the maximum deductibles of $2000 single/$4000 family on new plans and renewals, the “community ratings” guidelines, which require premiums not to be based on health status, but on age, geography and tobacco use (which will benefit older, sicker groups and hurt younger, healthier groups), the elimination of pre-existing conditions exclusions, the requirement to provide at no additional cost certain preventive care (including contraception), the summary of benefits and coverage disclosure rules that dictate how health plan benefits information has to be presented to participants, and the taxes on employers, including the $63/person fee for every participant in a health plan, the $2/person PCORI fee to fund research, and the premium tax of 2.54% for participants of fully-insured medical plans.

For those employers who do not provide health insurance yet to the majority of your workforce, you can take this time to shop around for better rates, to better structure your workforce as full-time or part-time, to set up better time-keeping systems to know how many hours each employee works each week, and to better train your human resources and benefits staff. However, you must understand that this delay should in no way stop your efforts to get ready for compliance with PPACA. It is breathing room, a break, but the work still needs to be done.

Gay Marriage Affects Texas Employers

Benefits, Discrimination, Employee Rights, Personnel Policies

 

Regardless of your political beliefs about gay marriage, you are going to need to start dealing with the legal implications in your business. The U.S. Supreme Court’s two decisions regarding gay marriage, issued June 26, will leave you as an employer with more questions than answers right now. Even though Texas doesn’t recognize same-sex marriages, there are going to be issues raised by your employees about the application of benefits and employment laws to same sex couples even within the 37 states that don’t yet allow gay marriages. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissent:

Imagine a pair of women who marry in Albany and then move to Alabama, which does not “recognize as valid any marriage of parties of the same sex.” Ala. Code §30–1–19(e) (2011). When the couple files their next federal tax return, may it be a joint one? Which State’s law controls, for federal-law purposes: their State of celebration (which recognizes the marriage) or their State of domicile (which does not)? (Does the answer depend on whether they were just visiting in Albany?) Are these questions to be answered as a matter of federal common law, or perhaps by borrowing a State’s choice-of-law rules? If so, which State’s?

Justice Scalia could have continued with questions such as: Must an employer offer COBRA continuation coverage of health insurance to a same-sex spouse, since COBRA is federally regulated, not a state issue? Does an employer in Texas have to provide Family and Medical Leave for an employee to provide his same-sex spouse (who legally married elsewhere) with care for a serious medical condition? Again, FMLA is a federal law, not a state one. There is some speculation among lawyers that President Obama will direct federal agencies such as the Department of Labor, when interpreting federal statutes such as FMLA or COBRA, to treat the “State of celebration”, as Scalia called it, as the state that matters, not the state of residence. This could mean that you as a Texas employer could be liable under FMLA, for example, even though gay marriage isn’t allowed in Texas.

In addition, many employee handbooks define “immediate family” for purposes of bereavement leave, personal leave, nepotism and health insurance benefits and include just the word “spouse” without a definition. Are you going to make a distinction in your business that the “spouse” must be an opposite-sex spouse? And if you do, will you at some point face a federal lawsuit for discrimination?

Is your head spinning yet from these questions?

The courts and the administrative branch will eventually give us the answers to these questions, but as an employer, you have to deal with many of them now as best you can. My suggestion is that if any question involving same-sex marriage arises with your employees, you call an employment lawyer immediately to find out the very latest regulations on this issues.

New COBRA Notice Requirements

Benefits, Forms and Policies, ,

When an employee leaves your company (if you employ 20 or more people), he or she is entitled for at least 18 months to continue any group health insurance coverage that you provide to your employees. This continuation coverage requires that the employee pay the insurance premiums to remain on your group health plan. Therefore the employee must be notified when he leaves your employ of the rights he has to elect to continue that coverage under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA). The same election notice must be provided to the employee or his/her dependents if the employee dies, the employee divorces, the employee becomes entitled to Medicare, or a dependent child ceases to be considered a dependent under the health plan.

On May 8, 2013, the Department of Labor updated the election notice you must provide to your employees under COBRA when these events happen. The notice has to be provided to the employee within 14 days of when the plan administrator (you as the employer or an administrator you pay to take care of this function) receives notice that one of the these events has occurred. The new election notice and a redlined version showing what has been changed from the notice you are now using is available on the DOL’s website at: https://www.dol.gov/ebsa/COBRA.html. COBRA carries a stiff daily monetary penalty for employers or administrators who do not timely and properly provide these election notices, so you should start using the new notice immediately.

The DOL also publishes a guide to help you understand and administer COBRA: https://www.dol.gov/ebsa/pdf/cobraemployer.pdf. However, because COBRA can be tricky, I prefer that my employer clients pay the little extra fee per month to have your insurance company act as your COBRA administrator and take responsibility to assure that the deadline and notice requirements are met.

 

 

Employers Vulnerable to Overtime Claims

Compensation, , ,

As it routinely does, the United States Department of Labor recently released to the media a report of another Texas employer who had to pay back wages to current and former employees for overtime violations. This time the company was Porter Ready Mix Inc., in Porter, Texas and the amount was $173,863. But it could have been almost any employer because the overtime laws are very difficult to understand and follow. The DOL gets more than 26,000 complaints a year and collected $224 million in back wages in fiscal year 2011. Some of its favorite targets are restaurants, construction companies, agriculture, hotels, healthcare providers, landscapers, preschools and other industries that pay lower wages, but no employer is immune. Porter Ready Mix’s mistake? It paid gravel truck drivers by the trip instead of by the hour.

If you as an employer are paying any employee in any manner other than by the hour and paying time and one-half for all hours over 40 worked in one week, you too could be facing a Department of Labor investigation soon. Paying employees by the day, by the trip, by travel time, by commission, by tips, by bonus, by incentive, even by weekly salary can put you in the hot seat. Salaried employees must fall into one of four or five narrow categories to be exempt from overtime. Many employers put employees on salary or another pay scheme without doing any analysis of whether failing to pay overtime is legal based on that particular employee’s job duties.

Don’t rely on your instinct, your competitors, your experience, your employee’s desires or any other resource other than the Fair Labor Standards Act when you set compensation for a new employee or when you are reviewing your current staff compensation. Do your research before you pay any employee on any basis other than hourly plus overtime.

New I-9 Form Required

Documentation, Hiring

On March 8, 2013, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services released a new I-9 form that all employers must begin using by May 7, 2013, to document the employment eligibility of new hires. If you are reverifying the eligibility of a current employee because an eligibility document expired, or if you are rehiring a former employee, you must also use the new form for those purposes. Just as before, every new employee must provide you with documents that verify the employee’s identity and eligibility to work in the United States within the first 3 days of employment. Only the form on which that eligibility review is documented has changed.

Here is the link to the new form: https://www.uscis.gov/files/form/i-9.pdf. There is no reason to delay in beginning to use this form, so make sure whoever is in charge of your hiring is aware of the change to the form.

 

Employers Required to Post New FMLA Information

Employee Rights, Forms and Policies, , ,

If you employ 50 or more employees (counted by names on a payroll, whether full-time, part-time, owner, etc.), your business is subject to the requirements of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which generally gives employees up to 12 weeks (26 weeks for military family leave) of unpaid leave for pregnancy, the birth or adoption of a child, a serious health condition of the employee or a family member or for leave associated with the call to active duty or the injury of a member of the military. If your business is subject to the FMLA, you must place a poster on your workplace bulletin boards about your employees’ rights under FMLA. A few weeks ago, the Department of Labor changed a little of the language of that poster with regards to military families and airline flight crews. Even if these changes don’t specifically apply to your workplace, if you employ 50 or more employees, you must post the new FMLA poster in your workplace by March 8, 2013. You can find the new poster and print out a free copy of it at: https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/posters/fmlaen.pdf.

Health Care Reform for Small Employers

Benefits, Hiring, Medical

Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”), health care reform questions have been raised by many of my employer clients. It is important for small businesses to know if and how the PPACA will affect them.

The PPACA “mandate”, requiring employers to provide health insurance to employees or face a penalty, does not apply to employers with less than 50 full-time employees or the equivalent of 50 full-time employees. This is the small business exemption to the mandate.

To apply this small business exemption, Continue reading Health Care Reform for Small Employers →

DOL Encourages Employees To Track Their Hours

Attendence, Compensation

The United States Department of Labor, long an agency that advocates for employees to the chagrin of employers, continued that trend by just releasing its first free application for smart phones to help employees in claims against their employers.

The app, for iPhone, allows employees to track work hours, overtime and breaks, all in an effort to discredit the records kept by the employer in any kind of wage and hour dispute. In times past, the employer kept the time clock or time sheets and paid accordingly. Employees can now easily record what they believe their working hours were and sue for more compensation, including overtime.

The app allows employees to send a copy of their time sheets via email to their own private email accounts, so that they can easily keep a paper trail with which to confront their employers. The app also includes summaries of the wage and hour laws and contact information for the DOL for employees to report violations. Continue reading DOL Encourages Employees To Track Their Hours →