New England Biz Law Update

In September, National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo issued two memoranda seeking to implement more severe penalties for unfair labor practice violations. These memos appear to move forward on President Biden’s indication that he would be the “strongest ...

Employers who implemented widespread work-from-home arrangements during the pandemic may soon find it harder to deny remote work requests made under disability claims. In September, the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC) filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against an employer for ...

A U.S. House of Representatives committee has approved a five-fold increase in penalties for violations of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards. If this change is finalized by Congress, the maximum penalties for “willful,” “repeated,” and “failure-to-abate” violations would ...

A recent federal appeals court ruling highlights the importance of paying attention to racial slurs in the workplace, including when they are made in a foreign language. That is especially true, the court said, when the slurs are part of ...

The Employee Retention Credit is expiring at the end of 2021, so there is limited time remaining for companies to claim it if they haven’t already. The IRS and Treasury Department recently issued a delayed guidance focusing on the extension ...

Dear readers, Welcome to Massachusetts Go To Lawyers, a feature we debuted last year to showcase leaders in the Massachusetts legal community by practice area. For this list, we’ve chosen to focus on commercial real estate lawyers. The attorneys featured here were all ...

For companies that sell products to consumers, reporting of safety hazards is always important. This year, enforcement activity by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) for reporting violations is up. In January, the Department of Justice announced that Walter Kidde ...

The Biden administration’s first published regulatory agenda includes plans for significant changes to the H-1B visa program for high-skilled workers. According to the agenda, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) plans to amend the H-1B program by: Redefining the employer/employee ...

Earlier this year, the federal Department of Labor enacted a 100-percent premium subsidy for eligible individuals enrolled in COBRA as part of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). This subsidy is available for assistance eligible individuals (AEI) between April 1 ...

The Biden administration has taken action on the definition of “independent contractor” under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. Trump’s Department of Labor had announced an employer-friendly five-part test that largely defined an independent contractor’s status based on the level ...