Disability Discrimination

The employment law landscape is always shifting, and there’s a lot to navigate, especially as the pandemic drags into its third year. On February 14, 2022, Hirschfeld Kraemer lawyers Steve Hirschfeld, Hieu Williams, Monte Grix, and Ferry Lopez presented a 90-minute webinar providing insight on the hottest developments in labor and employment law in 2021,…

This year saw a host of changes to California employment laws, and not all of them resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. While the laws changed rapidly to address the needs of employees and employers during these increasingly uncertain times, California laws changed significantly with regard to all sorts of everyday activities. Among other things: Employees…

Is it safe for work to reopen? That is the biggest question employers everywhere are asking as COVID-19 stay-at-home orders start to lift. But that one question spawns many others, such as: Who will come back to work? Will employees want to come in to work,or is telework the “new normal”? What safety precautions must…

We enter 2017 with a new President, a polarized electorate, an incomplete Supreme Court, and an increasingly isolated California. Against this dramatic backdrop, Glen Kraemer will examine the most important recent appellate decisions and legislation in the equal employment opportunity arena, while forecasting discrimination law trends that could dramatically impact our State in the new…

On Wednesday, July 8, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a much-anticipated ruling deciding that teachers at religious schools could not claim protections under anti-discrimination laws. The central issue in Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru concerned the scope of the “ministerial exception”—a legal doctrine grounded in the First Amendment fashioned to protect a religious…

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decided yesterday in Bethany College that it does not have jurisdiction over faculty at religious schools and colleges, overruling a 2014 decision which held the opposite. Click here to download the NLRB decision. The NLRB will decline jurisdiction over labor union election petitions and unfair labor practice claims if…

Over the past few months, California cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, and Oakland have raced to implement emergency sick leave ordinances to provide paid leave to employees not covered by the federal Families First Coronavirus Act (FFCRA). Consequently, California employers have had to grapple with quickly changing laws that vary based on…

Unfortunately, this is no childhood bedtime story. An alternative title (with apologies to The Bard) could be “The Winter of our Discontent.” The unflappable Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has declared “it is inevitable that we will have a return of the virus” and that “how…