Workforce Bulletin

Many employers have established wellness programs to promote employee health and, in doing so, help counter the ever increasing costs associated with employer-sponsored health benefit plans. Often employers want to establish programs that provide employees with incentives to achieve certain health outcomes, such as smoking cessation or weight loss. Employers must exercise caution in creating such health-contingent wellness programs, which necessarily require employees to disclose health information, because the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) and the ...

By:      Kara M. Maciel

The EEOC is holding a public meeting tomorrow, May 8, 2013, to discuss wellness programs and how the EEOC should interpret them under the ADA, GINA and other laws. This is welcome news to the employer community, who has been left without any guidance from the agency since 2000 as to how it will enforce wellness programs. The uncertainty generated by this lack of guidance has hampered businesses from implementing, or expanding, effective wellness programs.   

As we have explained in previous articles, the EEOC regulations, and the EEOC’s Interpretive and ...

By Greta Ravitsky

The Labor and Employment practice at Epstein Becker Green publishes a regular newsletter called "Take 5: Views You Can Use," which addresses 5 L&E topics around a related subject.  The January 2013 edition of Take 5 includes some important workplace health issues associated with implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), so we are providing a link to it here on the OSHA Law Update Blog.

In this month's Take 5 newsletter, one of EBG's Houston office Labor and Employment Partners, Greta Ravitsky, summarizes five important actions for employers to ...