Nolo's Employment Law Blog

After the Senate finally convinced Senator Jim Bunning to stand down his one-man protest (covered in my previous post), Congress passed -- and the President signed -- an extension of the COBRA subsidy last week. (You can find the bill, called "The Temporary Extension Act of 2010," here.) The extension is clearly a stopgap measure: It lasts only until the end of this month (March), by which time Congress hopes to have passed a more comprehensive jobs bill that will keep the subsidy in effect through the end of this year.

But the one-month extension of the subsidy wasn't the only COBRA news in the Temporary Extension Act: The bill also expands eligibility for the subsidy to those who initially lose their health insurance coverage due to a reduction in work hours, then are laid off. This is a small but vitally important change: Many businesses have tried to weather the current economic storm by cutting back on hours worked (and how much employees are paid for those hours). The most recent figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (for February 2010) show that more than six million people are involuntarily working part time due to business conditions or lack of work. Unfortunately, given the current economic climate, many of these businesses will ultimately have to make deeper cuts -- and many of these involuntary part-timers will eventually lose their jobs altogether.  

The new law gives these employees another opportunity to elect COBRA coverage once they are terminated -- and, therefore, become eligible for the subsidy. A cut in hours that makes an employee ineligible for group health insurance through the employer's plan is already a COBRA qualifying event, and the new law doesn't change that. Nor does the law make employees who are still working at reduced hours eligible for the subsidy. What the law does is provide an additional election period to these employees if they subsequently lose their jobs and become eligible for the subsidy. If an employee initially declined coverage or elected coverage but let it lapse, the new law gives that employee another chance to elect coverage after a job loss.   

This week, there have been a couple of big stories involving independent contractors -- more specifically, the classification of workers as independent contractors rather than employees (and vice versa). These stories show that worker classification is still a very hot topic, perhaps even more so in the current economic climate.

First, it was reported this week that President Obama's proposed budget includes a $25 million effort to stop the misclassification of employees as independent contractors, with funding for 100 new enforcement positions at the IRS. The Labor Department estimates that up to 30% of businesses misclassify employees as contractors, according to an article in the New York Times. 

This move isn't so surprising when you consider the economy -- and the money a company can save by classifying workers as contractors, who aren't entitled to benefits, overtime, workers' compensation coverage, or unemployment if they are let go. I've even heard stories of employees being laid off, then brought back months later as independent contractors to do essentially the same work. 

According to a study cited in Inc., about half of the jobs that have been created during the current economic recovery are "contingent," which means they are held not by employees but by temps and contractors. Used properly, contingent workers give companies the flexibility to ramp up quickly for a particular project, using professionals with experience and expertise, then pare back down just as quickly (and with very little legal exposure) once the project is done. Used improperly, turning employees into contingent workers exploits the employees, hurts morale and cohesion in the workplace, depletes state and federal tax coffers, and ultimately leaves workers at far greater risk of hitting bottom -- with no unemployment to protect them -- if the work runs out.

And speaking of hitting bottom and tax coffers, there was a second story about contractors this week. Apparently, the man who crashed a plane into an IRS office in Austin, Texas, yesterday was particularly angry about a provision of the Tax Code involving worker classification. The Times reported that the man's suicide note cited a 1986 law that made it more difficult for companies to classify certain workers who provide technical services as independent contractors. (The pilot of the plane was a computer software engineer.) The law ("Section 1706") essentially takes away certain defenses for these companies if they are audited for misclassification: Other companies can point to past industry practice, court rulings, and similar evidence to show that they had a reasonable basis for classifying workers as contractors, but those defenses aren't available for these technical services workers. The Times cites critics of the law, who say that it has prevented technical workers from becoming wealthy entrepeneurs and stymied technological innovation. The Times also reports that the law was passed essentialy as a way to raise tax revenue. 

Taken together, these two stories show the tension underlying worker classification: Workers are supposed to be classified according to the work they do, but the amount of money at stake seems to cloud everyone's judgment. And, the financial interests of private business and the government are decidedly at odds here. Generally speaking, when workers are classified as contractors, companies save money and the government loses money. When workers are classified as employees, companies pay more and the government collects more. 

While the financial incentives on both sides of the equation are therefore strong (and opposing), they are not supposed to be decisive. The law says that workers are to be classified according to what they do: Is their work essential to the employer's business? Does it require special training, skills, tools? Considering a long list of factors, do the workers truly look like independent business people, who can be expected to bargain at arm's length with the employer and cover their own costs of doing business? Or do they look more like employees, who have less bargaining power and may therefore need some protection against discrimination, on-the-job injuries, potentially oppressive working conditionsg, and job loss? With both business and government going broke, however, these fundamental policy considerations seem to have taken a back seat to financial concerns.    

About a year ago, the Supreme Court found in favor of an employee, Vicky Crawford, who was fired after she participated in an investigation of workplace sexual harassment. (The case was Crawford v. Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee; you can read my previous post about it here.) The Court held that Crawford could sue for retaliation; Crawford's employer had argued that, because Crawford was only a witness in the investigation and not the person who had originally complained of harassment, she was not protected from retaliation. After the Supreme Court's decision kept Crawford's claim alive, the case went back to the federal district court for a trial on the facts.

A couple of weeks ago, the jury reached a verdict: Crawford was awarded $1.5 million in damages. After losing its legal argument that Crawford couldn't bring a retaliation claim, the employer tried a different tack: It argued that Crawford wasn't fired for participating in the harassment case, but for performance problems. The employer said Crawford was once a good employee, but her performance had been slipping; when an audit revealed problems in the payroll department, including checks that were never deposited, she was ultimately fired.

Of course, we can only know the facts that were recounted in news articles or court decisions about the case. Based on the information I've seen, I think there are a few lessons employers can take from what happened in this case:

• Timing is everything. Retaliation cases are all about timing, more specifically how much time passed between the employee's protected activity and the employer's alleged retaliation. The shorter the time period, the more it looks like retaliation. Here, the HR person who conducted the harassment investigation reported possible problems in the payroll department on the same day she filed her report in the harassment case. Same day plus same person involved in both issues equals huge mountain for the employer to climb to refute a retaliation claim.
• Can I get a witness? You don't necessarily need one to decide that harassment took place. It looks like another big problem for the employer in this case was that it fired three employees who participated in the investigation -- in which pretty bad behavior was alleged. Crawford said that the harasser pulled her head into his crotch, asked to see her breasts, and grabbed his own crotch, saying "you know what's up." Two other employees also said that they were harassed, and were also fired. Yet, the employer argued that it couldn't discipline the harasser because there were no witnesses to the behavior. Again, I've got no inside line on what "really" happened, but if three employees all allege that they were harassed, that's ample reason to take action. Often, there are no witnesses to harassment other than the harasser and the harassee. That doesn't relieve employers of their obligation to take action to stop harassment.
• The work environment affects performance. Here, the employer said Crawford was once a good employee, but her performance declined. We don't know the source of Crawford's performance problems, but in a situation like this, employers should consider whether poor performance might be explained, at least in part, by the harassment. Employees who have been harassed might have higher absentee rates, problems concentrating, and other performance issues. If the problems are attributable to the harassment, the employer should deal with the underlying issue, then work with the employee to help her get back on track.  

A few weeks ago, an appeals court in New Jersey decided, in J.T.'s Tire Service v. United Rentals North America, that one business can sue another business for quid pro quo sexual harassment. If you're wondering how one business might make sexual advances toward another, the answer is: the old-fashioned way, with wandering hands and unwanted sexual propositions.

The facts of the case allege that Harold, the manager of an equipment rental company, stopped buying tires from Eileen, owner of a tire service, after she refused his sexual advances. She had been selling to the company for almost ten years, earning about $29,000 monthly from the account. After she rejected Harold's advances, he kissed and groped her, delayed payments to her company, and then stopped doing business with her altogether.

She (and her business) sued under a section of New Jersey's nondiscrimination law that makes it illegal to refuse to contract or do business with any person on the basis of a protected characteristic, including gender. The court found that Eileen faced quid pro quo sexual harassment, a form of gender discrimination that violated the statute. The court added that allowing such conduct would create barriers to a woman's ability to run a business on an equal footing with men, and was therefore exactly what the legislature was trying to get at when it passed this antidiscrimination provision.

There have been a number of legal developments involving Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter lately, all demonstrating that the intersection of traditional employment law and social networking sites has yet to be fully mapped.

Part of the problem seems to be that users of these sites believe themselves to be invisible, at least to their employers. For example, according to an article on Workforce Management (you may have to register to view it), investigators looking into employee workers' compensation claims search social networking sites for photos of employees engaged in activities that are incompatible with their claimed injuries -- such as bowling a perfect game, taking judo classes, or riding a bucking bronco. Then, there's the recently reported case filed by a Canadian woman, who says that her sick leave insurance benefits for depression were improperly cut off after an agent for the insurance company found photos of her on Facebook vacationing and taking in a show at Chippendales.

Even employees who take precautions to make sure employers can't view their posts are finding that management has its ways. In a recent case in the District Court of New Jersey, for example, some employees at Houston's restaurant created a group on MySpace for the stated purpose of venting about their jobs. The group was private and could be joined only by invitation. However, an employee member of the group showed it to a manager (she testified that she felt pressured to do so), a number of managers read it, and the employees who set it up were fired. The court recently upheld the jury's verdict in favor of the employees.

Some companies are so concerned about what employees -- or even the friends of employees -- might be saying about them online that they have instituted content rules or outright bans on social networking. According to an article in the National Law Journal, more than half of the companies responding a survey said that they prohibit employees from visiting social networking sites while on the clock. And, some companies have adopted rules about the content of employee posts. The Associated Press, for example, is reported to have not only set strict rules for employee pages (including that they should not express political affiliations or take a stand on contentious issues, even if their pages are restricted only to friends), but also asked employees to police the content others post on their pages. (You can find an article from Wired about it -- including a link to the actual policy -- here.) 

Last year was quite eventful when it comes to employment issues: Congress, the Supreme Court, and the crummy economy all did their part to keep things hopping. Here are some of the highlights:

• New laws. Starting with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act -- the first bill signed into law by President Obama -- Congress has had a busy year. It passed a law providing partial subsidies for COBRA continuing health care coverage, then extended it into 2010. Congress also expanded the newly passed military family leave provisions of the FMLA. Add to that the laws passed in 2008 that became effective last year: the ADAAA and GINA.
• New Supreme Court cases. Last year, the Supreme Court a handful of cases on retaliation, age discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, and race discrimination.
• New regulations. Proposed and final regulations were issued for the FMLA, the ADAAA, GINA

And 2010 could be another big year: In my next post, I'll talk about some of the changes that might be in the pipeline. Stay tuned.

Over the weekend, the Senate passed a defense spending bill that included -- among many other things -- an extension of the COBRA premium subsidy provision that's about to expire. (You can find the entire bill at the website of the Library of Congress; search for the bill number, H.R. 3326, then skip ahead to Section 1010). The House already passed the bill, and it's been sent to the President for signing.

Currently, the COBRA subsidy allows those who are involuntarily terminated from September 1, 2008, through December 31, 2009 to receive a subsidy of 65% of their COBRA premium payments for up to nine months. The subsidy went into effect on March 1, 2009, which means that the first group of eligible folks -- those who had already lost their jobs and have been receiving the subsidy since the effective date of March 1 -- used up their nine months of subsidy coverage on November 30.

The extension would:

• allow those who are involuntarily through February 28, 2010, to receive the COBRA subsidy, and
• extend the subsidy period from nine months to a total of 15 months.

The extension to 15 months of subsidy eligibility also applies to those who have already used up their original nine months. For example, someone who was laid off and began receiving the COBRA subsidy on March 1, 2009, would have used up the nine months of subsidized coverage a few weeks ago. Now, that person will be eligible for an additional six months of subsidy payments. And, this coverage can be retroactive: That is, if an employee's subsidy ran out, and the employee didn't pay the full cost of COBRA coverage for December, the employee will have an opportunity to pay the lower amount to receive retroactive continuation coverage.  

Last week, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear a case on the privacy of employee text messages, Quon v. Arch Wireless Operating Co. Although the Quon case involves a government employer, it raises a question that comes up all the time in both private and public workplaces: Are there limits to how far employers may go in monitoring their employees' electronic communications? The Quon case got a lot of press when it was initially decided by the Ninth Circuit, mostly because it's one of the very few cases in which a court said the employer had gone too far.

Jeff Quon was a segeant on the Ontario, California SWAT team. He was given a pager with wireless text-messaging capability for work, and was told that the department's email policy -- which gave the city the right to monitor, prohibited personal use, and told employees their messages were not private -- applied to the pagers. However, the lieutenant in charge of administering employee use of the pagers said something different: He told employees that each pager was allotted 25,000 characters per month, and that employee use of the pagers would not be audited as long as employees paid any overage charges for their accounts.

For eight months, the department did not audit anyone's pager messages. During this time, Quon exceeded the overage limit several times, and paid for his extra usage. When Quon and another officer again went over the limit, the chief decided to audit the use of certain pagers (including Quon's) to figure out whether the city should increase its 25,000 character allotment and whether the officers were using their pagers for personal reasons. The city asked its carrier (the Arch Wireless of the case title) to provide transcripts of the messages on the selected pagers, and found that many of Quon's messages were personal and some were sexually explicit. Quon, his wife, and two others with whom he exchanged text messages than sued for violation of their privacy rights.

The Ninth Circuit found against the city. Despite the written policy, the court found that the lieutenant's statement that he would not read their messages, combined with his practice of actually not reading messages for months, gave Quon and the others a reasonable expectation of privacy in their messages. The court also found that, even though the city's rationale for reading the messages was reasonable, it could have achieved that goal without reading the messages by, for example, warning Quon in advance that his pager would be audited, asking Quon to delete his personal messages, or asking Quon to count the work-related characters himself. Because there were less intrusive ways to find out what was going on with the pager accounts, the city's decision to read the messages was a privacy violation.

Because Quon involves a government employer, the Fourth Amendment (which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures) applies. The Fourth Amendment doesn't protect private employees, so the court's decision in Quon won't explicitly extend to the private sector. But it will be highly influential: Courts have generally followed similar standards in analyzing privacy claims against private employers. The case will also have wide resonance because it will be the Court's first foray (as far as I can tell) into modern workplace monitoring -- the kind that involves electronic and digital communication, not phone calls and locker searches.

It's not surprising that the Ninth Circuit is one of the few courts to find in favor of an employee's privacy claim. The Ninth Circuit is still known as one of the more liberal -- and protective of civil liberties -- in the nation. And, the judges of the Ninth Circuit, themselves federal employees, have not taken kindly to the monitoring of their own communications: Almost a decade ago, the judges disabled the monitoring software on their own computer systems to protest an announced policy stating that court employees had no right to privacy in their email messages and Internet activities. That part of the policy was later withdrawn, in part because of the attention drawn to it by the Ninth Circuit protest.

The federal agencies have released their Regulatory Plan and Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions (known as the "Unified Agenda.") Twice a year, federal agencies must provide this information to let the public know what regulatory actions they're planning and to coordinate rulemaking among the agencies.

The Unified Agenda can be somewhat daunting, both in length and in jargon (OMB Watch, a nonprofit that works to promote greater transparency in federal regulatory and budget matters, has a nice guide to some of the terms used in the Unified Agenda). Each federal agency that's included in the Unified Agenda must indicate what rulemaking it has planned in coming months. The list of agencies in the current Unified Agenda is here; when you click on an agency's link, you can see its statement.

The EEOC has identified two regulatory priorities:

1. Implementing the employment provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act (ADAAA). The EEOC issued proposed regulations on the ADAAA in September 2009 (you can check out my blog post reviewing the regs here), and asked for public comments to be submitted by November 23. Now, the agency must review all of those comments and come up with final regulations.
2. Amending its regulations on the "reasonable factor other than age" defense to an age discrimination claim under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), an issue the Supreme Court addressed last year. (Here's my blog post on that case, Meacham v. Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory.)

The Department of Labor painted with a broader brush: It begins its regulatory plan with a sort of mission statement, lising 12 "strategic outcomes," from improving health benefits to helping injured workers return to the job, all intended to further the agency's goal of "good jobs for everyone." Here are the specific regulatory proposals that interested me:

1. Updates to the child labor regulations.
2. A review of the military leave provisions and the 2009 regulations interpreting the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).
3. Changes to the record keeping regulation for Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). 

Last term, the Supreme Court decided a controversial age discrimination case called Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Inc. You can read my blog post about it here, including my prediction -- which has now proven accurate! -- that Congress would try to overturn the holding in the case. (In fairness, I wasn't alone; plenty of others made the same prediction.)

The Gross case held that employees alleging age discrimination have to do more than show that their age was a "motivating factor" in the decision they're complaining about. They must show that their age was what lawyers call the "but for" cause of the decision -- in other words, that the decision would not have been made if not for their age.

This standard is different than the one used for other types of discrimination. In Title VII cases, if the employee can show that a protected characteristic (such as race or national origin) was a motivating factor in the employer's decision, the burden of proof then shifts to the employer, who must prove that the same decision would have been made regardless. The logic behind this procedure is that any consideration of a protected characteristic is improper and illegal. So, for example, if the employee can prove that the employer was motivated, even in part, by the employee's race, the employer bears the responsibility of defending its actions and proving that race was ultimately not the deciding factor. The employer bears this burden because the employer is already at fault for taking race into account at all.

The Gross decision is just the latest indication that age discrimination is treated differently than other kinds of discrimination. In part, that's because age discrimination is prohibited by a different statute, which uses slightly different language than Title VII. But it's also due to our societal belief that age discrimination just isn't as bad as other types of discrimination. (For an interesting take on the reasons that might motivate this belief, check out this editorial from The New York Times this weekend.)

Anyone who has practiced employment law will tell you that you have to prove a lot to win an age discrimination case. Biased comments that would be the smoking gun in a sex or race discrimination case seem to barely raise an eyebrow. There's a long line of cases dismissing statements about workers being "too old," having "senior moments," or needing to get out of the way to make room for "younger, more energetic" employees as stray comments, not sufficient -- and sometimes, not even considered relevant -- to prove discrimination.

Last month, the "Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act" (HR 3721) was introduced in Congress. Its stated purpose is to overturn the Gross decision. It would require courts to follow the same burden shifting procedure in age discrimination cases as they follow in Title VII cases: Once the employee shows that age was a motivating factor in the decision, the employer would have to show that the decision would have been made even if age had not been considered. 

If this bill passes, it could make a big difference. As our population ages and competition for scarce jobs increases, age discrimination claims are on the rise. In 2008, the EEOC reported that charges of age discrimination increased more than 28% from the previous year, the largest increase of any type of claim.