For years now, the Connecticut Department of Revenue Services (DRS), the Connecticut Department of Labor (DOL) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have been targeting Connecticut employers for worker misclassification audits. When a misclassification is discovered, these government entities can share information about employers who have misclassified employees as independent contractors. Thus, when one of these government entities finds a misclassification during an audit, audits from the other governmental entities are likely to arise.…
Continue Reading

Shipman & Goodwin attorney Gabriel Jiran weighs in on the growing trend of employees using social media to communicate about issues of concern regarding their employers in the Law360 article “Digital-Age Workers Are Finding Their Voice On Social Media.”

To read the full article, click here.

Last week, New York’s Governor Cuomo signed into law the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA).  The new law, which had languished in the New York legislature for nearly 16 years, will go into effect in 30 days.  GENDA makes it illegal to discriminate against an individual on the basis of their gender identity or gender…

Once again, the Trump-era National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) has overruled a previous Obama-era Labor Board decision, establishing an objective test for determining whether statements made by an employee constitutes protected activity under the National Labor Relations Act.

The case, Alstate Maintenance, LLC and Greenidge, 367 NLRB No. 68 (2019), came before the Labor Board…

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed an earlier Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision and held that courts may not decide a question of arbitrability when parties have contractually delegated that question to an arbitrator. Henry Schein, Inc. v. Archer & White Sales, Inc., No. 17-1272 (U.S. January 8, 2019).

While on its…

The IRS recently released two notices to provide guidance for tax-exempt organizations about how to comply with the new provision that they treat employer-provided parking and qualified transportation fringe benefits as unrelated business taxable income (“UBTI”).

This unprecedented treatment of expenses as income created substantial uncertainty about how to calculate the UBTI from the parking…

As a reminder to Connecticut employers, legislation amending Connecticut’s Pay Equity law that was signed by Governor Malloy this past May becomes effective on January 1, 2019. The new amendment to the Pay Equity law prohibits employers from inquiring about a prospective employee’s wage and salary history unless otherwise required to do so by state…

Unions have been actively organizing graduate students, while wanting to avoid having the National Labor Relations Board involved. They are particularly concerned that President Trump’s appointees to the National Labor Relations Board, who are now a majority of the Board members, will revisit and reverse the Columbia University decision. That decision determined that graduate students…

Shipman & Goodwin attorney Leander A. Dolphin will participate in the panel discussion “#Metoo: Preventing and Responding to Sexual Harassment in the Professional Workplace” hosted by the University of Saint Joseph.

When: November 26, 2018, 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM EST

Where: University of Saint Joseph
West Hartford Campus, Crystal Room

For more information, please