SimplyHR | Employment & Labor Blog 

Last month the United States Supreme Court refused to resolve the circuit split that has evolved over the issue of whether there is an affirmative duty under the Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA") to accommodate a disabled individual through reassignment to another vacant job, without regard to whether there is a more qualified applicant for the same job. (The ADA prohibits employers with 15 or more employees from discriminating against individuals with disabilities and requires employers to engage in an interactive process with employees and applicants to determine whether there is a reasonable accommodation that will enable an employee to perform the job held or desired.)

In today’s economy, employers are receiving orders to garnish employee wages on an increasingly frequent basis. Causing even bigger headaches are situations in which multiple garnishments are received for the same employee. For example, it is not unusual for an employee to be subject to both a defaulted student loan and a child support order at the same time. And, if a garnishment order is ignored or interpreted incorrectly, your Company could be liable for your employee’s debt, in addition to legal fees and sometimes penalties! On the other hand, you could be obligated to repay your employee if you withhold too much!

So what’s an employer to do to minimize liability and ensure compliance? 

In announcing wage settlements with private employers, the DOL routinely states that it wants employees to get “every penny they earn." However, realistically the stakes of a wage and hour investigation by the DOL or a wage and hour class action by a current or former employee are much higher than paying each employee down to the penny. You might ask yourself, “Is it better or worse to draw a DOL investigation as opposed to a private class action?” The answer is that the stakes are different but high in either case—it’s truly a coin toss that you can’t win.

What does your mother’s high blood pressure have to do with your job protection? According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”): everything.

A virtually unknown and unused federal anti-discrimination statute—which applies to employers with fifteen (15) or more employees—is quickly taking center stage with the EEOC. For the second time in a month, the EEOC has filed suit alleging violations of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (“GINA”).