Workforce Bulletin

As featured in #WorkforceWednesday: With such a tumultuous year of labor and employment updates behind us, it begs the question, “What lies ahead in 2024?”

In this special New Year's episode, Epstein Becker Green attorneys share insights and predictions for the 2024 labor and employment space, addressing important topics such as maintaining compliance, promoting mental health, navigating protected concerted activity policies, and staying abreast of the latest developments in artificial intelligence and non-compete guidance.

In this special year-end episode of Employment Law This Week, recorded live from our 42nd Annual Workforce Management Briefing in New York City, Epstein Becker Green attorneys discuss the biggest employment law trends and crucial workforce changes in 2023, covering everything from non-competes and National Labor Relations Board actions to union dynamics, cybersecurity, and the impacts of artificial intelligence.

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Employment Law This Week^® gives a rundown of the top developments in employment and ...

As featured in #WorkforceWednesday:  This week, we’re elaborating on the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB’s) controversial joint-employer rule:

The joint-employer rule published by the NLRB on October 26 expanded the definition of the rule in ways that will likely have a major impact on the workplace. However, a recent postponement means that the rule will not take effect until February 26, 2024.

Epstein Becker Green attorneys Steven M. Swirsky and Erin E. Schaefer tell us the implications this rule may have for employers and how a flurry of legal challenges ...

On August 2, 2023, the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB” or “Board”) announced a long-anticipated decision called Stericyle that will affect how employers craft, apply and enforce workplace policies, regardless of whether a labor union represents their employees. As we anticipated several years ago, the Stericyle Board, with a majority of members nominated by President Joseph Biden, rejected the agency’s 2017 decision in The Boeing Company, in which it adopted a balancing test to evaluate facially neutral employer rules and handbook provisions. Under The Boeing Company test, the Board weighed the nature and extent of such rules’ potential impact on employee rights under the National Labor Relations Act (“NLRA”) against employers’ legitimate justification(s) for the policies.

The majority opinion in Stericycle Inc. substantively revives the NLRB’s stance on workplace rules as established in the 2004 Lutheran Heritage decision. Under this new framework, the mere maintenance of any employer’s rule, policy, or handbook provision that has a “reasonable tendency to chill employees from exercising their Section 7 rights” may constitute an unfair labor practice in violation of the NLRA.

Approximately a month after the Board issued McLaren Macomb, 372 NLRB No. 58, which left employers scrambling to decipher its unclear impact on both unionized and non-unionized workplaces, Jennifer Abruzzo, the General Counsel (“GC”) of the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB” or “Board”) released guidance outlining her views on the decision’s implications and meaning in Memorandum GC 23-05 on March 22, 2023. The GC’s Memo contains an FAQ in response to inquiries the NLRB has received about the McLaren Macomb decision and outlines Abruzzo’s plans for enforcement of the decision.

The United States Supreme Court (“SCOTUS”), in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, has held that there is no constitutional right to abortion, overruling Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood.