The United States Supreme Court issued an important decision for employers on January 15, 2025, where It held that employers do not have a heightened standard of proof to show that an employee is exempt from the “white collar” exemptions from minimum wage and overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”).Continue Reading U.S. Supreme Court Clarifies Employers’ Burden To Prove FLSA White Collar Exemptions, but Questions Persist Regarding Salary Requirements

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (“EEOC”) Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace

The EEOC’s Enforcement Guidance guidelines on harassment in the Workplace were issued on April 29, 2024. In the guidance, the EEOC presents a legal analysis of standards for harassment and employer liability applicable to claims of harassment under the EEO statutes enforced by the Commission. The guidance sets forth the EEOC’s position on its definition of “protected characteristics” and identifies workplace behaviors that rise to the level of harassment. These include prohibitions on work-related harassment based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions; sexual orientation; and gender identity), national origin, disability, genetic information, and age (40 or over).Continue Reading Labor and Employment 2025 Federal Legal Updates

The federal Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) is the law that, among other things, requires covered employees to be paid time-and-a-half for hours worked over 40 hours in a given week. As we have repeatedly said to anyone who will listen, the fact that cannabis remains federally illegal does not mean that cannabis employers can ignore federal employment (or any other) law. The case of Waxler v All Green Transport LLC, et al., currently pending in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan with case number 23-cv-00897, is a perfect example of that.Continue Reading Michigan Secure Cannabis Transporter Does Not Get Quick Dismissal From FLSA Case

On April 23, the U.S. Department of Labor (“DOL”) published a set of final regulations dramatically increasing the salary level most executive, professional, and administrative employees must be paid to retain their overtime exempt status under the Fair Labor Standards Act. In most respects, and after considering 33,000 comments, the final regulations are similar to those proposed last September. The DOL has “dug-in” on many of the proposed regulations’ controversial terms. The changes are to the salary level test, only. The DOL did not modify the other two tests most workers must satisfy to be deemed exempt, i.e., the salary basis test and the duties test.Continue Reading New Overtime Exemption Rules Announced: What Employers Need to Know and Do

On March 7, 2023, a federal court in Pennsylvania issued a ruling denying a cannabis company’s motion to dismiss claims based on the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (the “FLSA”). The opinion in DeMarco et al. v. FarmaceuticalRC, LLC et al., W.D. Pa. Case No. 2022cv-1164, covers familiar ground in the realm of FLSA misclassification cases, and explains why the plaintiffs—who work as drivers ferrying defendants’ cannabis products along their supply chain—sufficiently pled their claims. Specifically, the court applied the six-factor test for determining whether a given worker is an employee or an independent contractor and found that plaintiffs had sufficiently alleged the existence of an employer-employee relationship.Continue Reading Cannabis Employee Misclassification Case Moves Forward in Federal Court