Over 200,000 demonstrators took part in the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The event’s impact – famously known for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech – lead to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The protest had a WW II precursor. In 1941, A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, called for a march on D.C. to protest employment discrimination against African Americans in the defense industry. The specter of 100,000 marchers descending on the capital pressed President Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802, creating the Fair Employment Practices Commission to investigate such racial inequality. In response, Randolph called off the march.

Mr. Randolph was instrumental in conceiving the 1963 March. That spring, he sought Dr. King’s support for a planned June march “for Negro job rights.” In May, at the height of the Birmingham Campaign for equal racial access to that city’s commercial businesses, King joined Randolph and other Black leadership to call for such a move upon Washington later that year, eventually scheduled for August 28. Stated goals included passage of a comprehensive civil rights bill to ban segregation in restaurants, transportation and all other public accommodations; voting rights protections; public school desegregation; a federal works employment training program; and “a Federal Fair Employment Practices Act barring discrimination in all employment.”

Thanks to the courage of the many who stood up to confront non-violently the widespread hatred and intolerance of the time, the resulting 1964 Civil Rights Act remains America’s principal anti-discrimination law, prohibiting segregation in public places and banning employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C.
08/28/1963

February 6, 2020

With two exceptions (New Zealand, 1894; Australia, 1896), no country had a minimum wage law until the 20th Century. Instead, employers paid supposed “just (or fair) wages” on the purported mutual consent of their workers.

Beginning in the late 1800s, religious and political groups attacked the “just wages” principle on the premise that the vast majority of employees lacked the bargaining power to negotiate a livable wage. In the United States and throughout the industrialized world, factory conditions were also notoriously harsh and workdays long. Not uncommonly at the time, American businesses hired woman and children for lower wages than men. By 1910, two million children worked up to 20 hours a day in this country. Exhausted, many were killed or injured on the job.

In the 1920s, American lawmakers sought to improve working conditions in their states. By 1925, fifteen states had passed minimum wage laws, including California at 16 cents an hour. The U.S. Supreme Court later ruled several of the laws unconstitutional. (By 1929, every state had passed laws limiting child labor.)

President Roosevelt’s New Deal radically changed the employment landscape. The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) established the first federal minimum wage at 25 cents an hour. The law also imposed overtime pay (“time and a half”) after a mandated 40-hour regular workweek. The Act also introduced the classification of “exempt (from overtime)” and “non-exempt” employees as well as outlawed many forms of child labor.

By 1943, the Labor Department had raised the federal minimum wage to 40 cents an hour. It hit $1.00/hour in 1955. Federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since 2009. Although each U.S. state has the power to set a higher minimum wage than the federal rate, none can set a lower one.

The Fair Labor Standards Act, American wage regulations, and state enactments have evolved into a complex body of state and federal employment law requiring that employers take careful measures to ensure compliance.

At least ten nations still lack minimum wage standards for private business employment, including Egypt, Ethiopia, Qatar, Singapore, Somalia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

See also:

• WHAT’S NEW IN 2020 – California Minimum Wage Rates

January 31, 2020

The Internal Revenue Service has announced its 2020 optional standard mileage reimbursement rate for employee business use of a personal vehicle, effective January 1, 2020, decreasing from 58 to 57.5 cents.

These rates stem from annual government studies of fixed and variable automotive operating costs, including insurance, repairs, maintenance, gasoline and oil.

Under California Labor Code section 2802, employers must reimburse employees for all actual work-related expenses necessarily incurred.

According to California’s Division of Labor Standards Enforcement, using the IRS mileage reimbursement rate will satisfy an employer’s reimbursement obligation unless the employee provides evidence demonstrating otherwise. For example, if the employee can show the IRS reimbursement rate does not cover all actual and necessary business-related vehicle expenses, the employer must pay the difference.

For further assistance in complying with the new laws, please contact Tim Bowles, Cindy Bamforth or Helena Kobrin.

Cindy Bamforth
January 30, 2020

Many employers mistakenly presume they can depend on their payroll companies for legally compliant services. The fine print will almost certainly establish otherwise.

Unfortunately, more than a few businesses have learned this lesson the hard way. It is common for payroll service providers to handle compensation calculations and paystub disclosures as their employer-clients instruct, even if it is wrong.

For example, a Los Angeles company may find its payroll vendor – even one of the larger ones – has been listing the state-mandated 24 hours of paid sick leave on worker pay statements, notwithstanding the higher 48-hour standard the city requires. Even if previously unaware of the difference, that employer could well find its payroll company adjusts such benefit calculations on paystubs to match any higher local municipal minimums only if the client-employer specifically directs it.

Thus, “buyer (employer) beware.” Managers should read payroll service contracts carefully. Agreements can commonly disclaim any payroll vendor responsibility for compliance with applicable federal, state or local workplace laws. Thus, when a worker, or even a possible class of them, might raise a legitimate complaint over underpayment or other payroll violation, it’s typically the employer who holds the bag.

Especially in California with its shifting legal landscape, employers must thus be vigilant in seeking, understanding and properly applying the pertinent wage and hour laws. While payroll companies can perform the mechanics of employee pay admirably, they are not an employer’s legal adviser or lookout.

See also:

• Correct Pay Stubs Save Bucks (May 2018)
• Paperless Pay Stubs (Feb 2018)
• Bulletproofing Los Angeles’ Paid Sick Leave Ordinance? (October 2016)
• City of Los Angeles Casts on its New Minimum Wage and Paid Sick Leave Ordinances (July 2016)

For more information, please contact Tim Bowles, Cindy Bamforth or Helena Kobrin.

Helena Kobrin
Tim Bowles
January 23, 2020

Since 2002, California has required employers to provide their lactating employees with reasonable time and adequate space to express breast milk. Effective January 1, 2020, Senate Bill (SB) 142 requires a clean, private and safe workplace location for the activity and a written lactation accommodation policy. Significant penalties apply for non-compliance.

Private room or location requirements:

Employers must provide lactating employees with a room or location that * can no longer be a bathroom; * is shielded from view and free from intrusion while expressing milk; * is safe, clean and free of hazardous materials; * contains a place to sit and a surface to place personal items; * has access to electricity or alternative devices needed to operate an electric or battery-powered breast pump; and * provides access to a sink and refrigerator (or other cooling device) in close proximity to the employee’s workspace.

Employer exemptions:

Certain employers, particularly those in multiemployer worksites, may be excused from some of the above room/location requirements. Additionally, employers with less than 50 on payroll may qualify for an undue hardship exemption in limited circumstances (e.g., if any of the lactation room requirements would cause significant difficulty or expense). However, all exempted employers must still make reasonable efforts to provide the employee with the use of a private room or other location other than a toilet stall to express milk. See, Labor Code 1031(i).

Mandatory policy:

Newly-added Labor Code 1034 further requires employers to develop and implement a lactation accommodation policy that contains:

1. An employee’s right to request such accommodation and how to make the request;
2. The employer’s obligation to respond to the request; and
3. An employee’s right to file a complaint with the California Labor Commissioner for any alleged violations.

Employers must distribute the policy to new employees upon hiring and whenever an employer makes an inquiry about or requests parental leave.

Penalties for non-compliance:

The Labor Commissioner may cite employers for denial of reasonable break time or adequate space to express milk and impose civil penalties of $100 for each day the employer is in violation. Failure to comply with the above break time or adequate space requirements also constitute Labor Code section 226.7 rest break violations. See, Labor Code 1033(a).

For further assistance in complying with the new laws, please contact Tim Bowles, Cindy Bamforth or Helena Kobrin.

See also,

• What’s New for 2019 – Nursing Moms and The Workplace (November, 2018)

Cindy Bamforth
January 17, 2020

My “night job” for some 15 years now is to help make a difference in one of the most challenging regions of the planet, including the nations of Liberia and Sierra Leone, West Africa.

Illiteracy fueled the hatred, fear, and bloodthirsty revenge that marked Liberia’s coup d’etat in 1979-80, its 14 years of genocidal civil war between 1989 – 2003 and the 11 years of similarly savage conflict in neighboring Sierra Leone (1991 – 2002). This is a region notorious for child soldiers, kids as young as 7 or 8 years old reduced to mindless killing machines as graphically portrayed in the motion picture Beasts of No Nation (2015).

As the region struggled to recover from these insane slaughters, Ebola hit and ran largely out of control, for most of 2014 and into 2015, with more than 22,400 cases and more than 8,900 deaths to the disease. Among other devastating effects, the disease forced the indefinite closure of Liberia’s schools, nationwide, for the better part of a year.

This wasn’t just an “African problem.” The Ebola disaster spilled out into the West in late 2014, with two persons dying of the disease in the U.S., accompanied by media hysteria and growing public panic.

Illiteracy is the most destructive human rights violation as it makes violations of the remainder of the 30 articles of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) possible.

These humanitarian disasters must be a wake-up call to all but those terminally deaf and blind to the world’s sufferings. Effective action is not a luxury here. It is required.

Along with many courageous and inspired West African youth leaders, I created the African Human Rights Leadership Campaign for Youth for Human Rights International (YHRI) in 2006, since that time activating thousands of youth of the region as human rights educators, teaching by example and deed.

Now focusing wholly on Article 26 of the UDHR, we have partnered since 2016 with Applied Scholastics International (APS), an organization uniquely qualified to offer the solution to illiteracy through the proven effective learning methods of American author and innovator L. Ron Hubbard, widely known as “Study Technology ” or “Study Tech.” We dub our initiative the African Literacy Project.

Our 2019 delivery included teacher and student training programs in Kakata and Tubmanburg, key Liberian cities, as well as our third year running with the ongoing third summers with African Methodist Episcopal (AME) University's Vacation Bridge program in Monrovia. In August, we were also able to expand our reach to Freetown, Sierra Leone. Pictures below.

The best is yet to come. Our ultimate aim – in partnership with a coalition of our major government and private supporters – is to help make the human right to education a fact in West Africa. Starting with Liberia and Sierra Leone, we can and will make this significant long-range contribution through the establishment of national and regional literacy education teacher training centers.

To those of you who have contributed over the years, thank you. To those who will continue to provide the vital financial fuel, your help will also assure a future worth creating in one of the most challenged regions of our world.

Donations are currently through this GoFundMe link: African Literacy Project. Again, thanks. No amount too large, or too modest!

Tim Bowles
January 16, 2020

African Literacy Project
Vacation Bridge graduation
AME University, Monrovia Liberia
July, 2019

Classroom
New Kru Town, Liberia
February, 2019

Students in Classroom
Freetown, Sierra Leone
August, 2019

Jay Yarsiah and Vacation Bridge students
AME University, Monrovia Liberia
July, 2019

Girl
Ganta, Liberia, 2018

January 16, 2020

The Twentieth Century, and the start of the Twenty-First, have been no cakewalk. While our advances in science and technology have made possible the real prospect of a civilized world community, the reason, ethics and justice that would establish a secure society and lasting peace have been repeatedly crushed by the madness of ignorance, global war and genocide. In the past one hundred years, more people died in the cause of freedom – and at the hands of technological “advancement” – and more put to death for their religion than at any other period of recorded history.

While some say that the past century delivered lessons that have enabled a more stable and interdependent world, we need not look very far for signs to the contrary – decaying, ineffective educational systems, growing pharmaceutical dependence for emotional “stability,” and destruction of human rights and civil liberties to “fight” faceless terrorism. Unless effective and enlightened leadership prevails, these trends herald this emerging Twenty-First Century as more anguished and inhumane than the one that has just passed.

I am a lawyer – and foster and expand this firm – because human survival depends on a social framework that promotes and supports the basic rights and nature of humanity to create and change conditions for the better. We are dedicated to serving in the employment realm as our societies are engaged upon it the vast majority of time. The workplace is thus a critical setting for productive, fair and mutually beneficial human interchange.

The justice system works only when individual citizens adhere to and are accountable to the ideal of personal responsibility – responsibility for one’s own condition, for family, for community and for the human race. Through our work as trusted advisors and litigators, our law firm is committed to helping those we touch to achieve that noble and worthwhile end.

Tim Bowles

January, 2020

Targets of workplace discrimination, harassment and retaliation prohibited by California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) now have three years (up from the previous one year) to file a claim with California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) against the subject employer.

A person claiming such wrongful conduct must file that DFEH complaint as well as request and receive a right-to-sue letter from that agency before initiating a FEHA lawsuit.

Responding to #MeToo concerns that recipients of such abuse need more time to process, the legislature’s Assembly Bill (AB) 9, effective January 1, 2020, amends the FEHA to permit this longer three-year period. Extensions from 90 days to one year are available for special circumstances such as late discovery of the facts. Some other types of FEHA claims, e.g. for housing discrimination, still have a one-year deadline. Government Code section 12960(e).

A claimant has one year from the date of his/her DFEH right-to-sue letter to file the FEHA court suit.

Employers may now have to respond to court-filed allegations – and to muster documents and witnesses – for incidents four-years or more old. Thus, best personnel practices might well include:

• having a clear-cut policy for reporting and investigating allegations of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation;
• documenting clearly and maintaining thorough records of all such investigations; and
• maintaining contact information for departing employees who may become witnesses over any significant workplace upset or dispute.

See also:

• Boss Sauced; Senior Managers Must Prevent Supervisor Harassment, Discrimination (Sept 2019)

For more information, please contact Tim Bowles, Cindy Bamforth or Helena Kobrin.

Helena Kobrin
Tim Bowles
January 10, 2020

Arbitration is a form of private dispute resolution that takes the place of a lawsuit and court trial. Arbitration has many business-related advantages, including a more efficient, less-public process than the often-prolonged procedures of the court. Thus, employers often favor this alternative.

California Labor Code section 432.6, effective January 1, 2020 as part of Assembly Bill (AB) 51, restricts the scope and terms of workplace arbitration agreements. In-state employers will no longer be allowed to require job applicants or employees to enter into mandatory arbitration agreements for discrimination, harassment or retaliation claims under the California Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) and/or claims under the California Labor Code. As this new law has no retroactive application, any valid arbitration agreement under pre-2020 California law signed by December 31, 2019 will remain valid after that date.

Any arbitration agreement entered on or after January 1, 2020 should contain language clearly confirming the worker is voluntarily choosing to arbitrate disputes arising from or relating to the employment relationship. From that date, California employers will no longer be able to condition most workplace arbitration agreements as take-it-or-leave-it even if the employee can opt out of the agreement later. Applicants and employees also cannot be threatened, retaliated or discriminated against for refusing to consent to an otherwise compliant agreement.

Subsection 432.6(f) presents an exception, currently of uncertain scope. Any written arbitration agreement enforceable by the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) is not invalidated by this new law. It is left to the courts whether the above ban on mandatory agreements conflicts with the FAA.

In the meantime, as failure to comply with the new law exposes employers to damages claims and possible criminal charges, it is risky to presume this FAA exemption will ultimately prevail. The better practice for affected employers is to ensure compliance with section 432.6 upon the start of the new year.

For further information, please contact Tim Bowles, Cindy Bamforth or Helena Kobrin.

Cindy Bamforth
December 18, 2019