Business Law Firm of Jacobs and Dodds

The City of Los Angeles has a mandatory paid sick leave (PSL) law which is part of its minimum wage  ordinance  and which has been in effect since July 1, 2016 for employers with 26 or more employees.  The Los Angeles PSL ordinance will begin to apply to employers with 25 or fewer employees on July 1, 2017. From an employer perspective, one of the toughest challenges of these local PSL ordinances is that the rules can change at any time. That is precisely what happened with Los Angeles’s ordinance when the city recently revised the  rules and regulations  relating to this ordinance. The city also revised its answers to  frequently asked questions  (FAQ). Some of these changes or clarifications are important, providing information on topics such as: ·        How to determine business size; ·        How to pay employees for sick time; ·        When an existing paid leave or paid time off policy can satisfy the requirements of the ordinance; ·        How to use the frontloadi

LAW AND FORUM CHOICE IN EMPLOYMENT CONTRACTS Law: SB1241 Employees who primarily work and reside in California cannot be required by employers to enter agreements that would put their claims in a non-California forum or generally litigate claims under law of another jurisdiction. Effective Jan. 1. What it means: In a legal dispute between employee and employer, what happens in California has to stay in California. The bill forbids adjudication outside of California, including arbitration, for a claim arising in California. With SB1241, a Texas-based company, for example, can no longer hold a California employee to the noncompetition rule or law in an employment contract that is based on Texas law. WAGE DISCRIMINATION PROTECTIONS COVER RACE, ETHNICITY, PRIOR SALARY Laws: AB1676 and SB1063 Both bills are amendments to the state’s Fair Pay Act. AB1676 says an opposite-sex employee’s prior salary alone cannot justify a disparity in compensation for equal work on jobs which

In California the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE) adjudicates wage claims on behalf of workers who file claims for nonpayment of wages, overtime, or vacation pay, pursuant to California Labor Code sections 96 and 98. DLSE deputies hold informal conferences between employers and employees to resolve wage disputes. If a matter cannot be resolved at the informal conference, an administrative hearing is held to make a final determination on the matter. An employee (plaintiff) alleging the non-payment of wages or other compensation by his or her employer (defendant), must file a claim (the DLSE Form 1, “Initial Report or Claim” form) with a local office of DLSE to initiate investigation of the claim by the Labor Commissioner.  The employee is asked to provide any time records the plaintiff kept of the hours and dates worked that support the claim, paychecks and pay stubs showing the wages paid during the claim period and dishonored (or “bounced”) paycheck(s) during the clai

So far this year three cities in Southern California have passed ordinances mandating certain sick leave requirements for employers. These ordinances are considerably more liberal then the state sick leave laws mandated by the State of California.  Under California law as long as the ordinances passed by cities have sick leave policies offering at least as much protection for employees as the state laws, the local ordinances will control. If employers in one city have workers travelling to other cities to work, the employer must track each employees hours spent in the other city if the other city has a sick leave ordinance. The employer must comply with the sick leave ordinances in the other cities that have the ordinances based on the hours worked in that city by the employee. San Diego Overview : Thanks to a votes’ initiative that passed in June 2016, San Diego will have its own paid sick leave policy of five days (40 hours). This is in excess of the California Sick Leave law

The laws regarding sick leave law in California can be confusing and are complex. However the following is a summary of the law as of June 15, 2016. Please note that local city governments can establish their own ordinances regarding sick leave.  These ordinances will control as long as they offer at least the minimum amount of sick leave offered under state law.  The city counsel for the City of Los Angeles has recently passed such an ordinance which will probably take effect in July 2016: The state’s sick leave law went into effect on January 1, 2015. However, the right to begin accruing and taking sick leave under this law did not go into effect until July 1, 2015. To qualify for sick leave, an employee must: • Work for the same employer, on or after January 1, 2015, for at least 30 days within a year in California, and • Satisfy a 90-day employment period (similar to a probationary period) before taking any sick leave. If an employee works less than 30 calendar days within

In the 9th Circuit case of Andrew Corbin v. Time Warner Entertainment- Advance the Court addressed the issue of employers who round off time worked by employees in computing their wages. In the Corbin case the employer rounded time off to the nearest quarter hour.  As stated by the Court, "This case turns on $15.02 and one minute. $15.02 represents the total amount of compensation that Plaintiff Andre Corbin (“Corbin”) alleges he has lost due to his employer’s, Defendant Time Warner EntertainmentAdvance/Newhouse Partnership (“TWEAN”), compensation policy that rounds all employee time stamps to the nearest quarter-hour. One minute represents the total amount of time for which Corbin alleges he was not compensated as he once mistakenly opened an auxiliary computer program before clocking into TWEAN’s timekeeping software platform. $15.02 in lost wages and one minute of uncompensated time, Corbin argued before the district court, entitled him to relief under the Fair Labor Standa