On September 29, 2016, the DOL released a final rule requiring federal contractors to provide seven days of paid sick leave annually. The rule implements a 2015 executive order from President Obama that we covered in greater detail here. More than 35,000 individuals and organizations submitted comments on the DOL’s proposed rule.
Earlier this year, we predicted that the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance (“OFCCP”) would ramp up investigations directed at rooting out alleged discrimination by information technology companies. Many tech companies have indeed been the focus of increasingly intense and acrimonious investigations in 2016.
OFCCP took its enforcement efforts to the next level this week by filing a formal administrative complaint for violations of Executive Order 11246 (which prohibits discrimination by federal contractors). The complaint alleges that Palantir Technologies – a private software company headquartered in Palo Alto and recently valued at $20 billion – discriminated against Asian applicants for three positions (QA Engineer, Software Engineer, and QA Engineer Intern). Specifically, the OFCCP alleges that the company hired largely based on an employee referral system that resulted in statistically significant underrepresentation of Asian hires, given that the vast majority of applicants for these jobs were Asian. The complaint seeks to debar the company from future federal contracts and require “complete relief” for Asian applicants for these roles, including lost compensation, hiring, and retroactive seniority.
The Department of Labor (“DOL”) continues its regulatory dash to fulfill the President’s domestic agenda. The agency issued proposed rules, that seek to make President Obama’s Executive Order 13706, Establishing Paid Sick Leave for Federal Contractors signed on September 7, 2015, into a reality. The DOL solicits any comments on the proposed rules on or before March 28, 2016. Once effective, employees of certain federal contractors would be entitled to paid leave akin to the leave now in place in 4 states, the District of Columbia, and 27 other localities that are entitled to paid sick leave.
The President released his 2017 budget this week. Budgets are aspirational documents that Congress rarely implements in full. The current acrimony between Congress and the Administration ensures that the President’s 2017 budget will likely remain aspirational. However, Presidential budgets and their accompanying justifications can shed light on an agency’s priorities.
On December 3, 2014, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) released its final rule barring federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The final rule implements an Executive Order signed by President Obama in July 2014 amending Executive Order 11,246 to include sexual orientation and gender identity as prohibited bases of employment discrimination by federal contractors and subcontractors.
On October 10, 2014, the White House hosted a listening session regarding President Obama’s “Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces” Executive Order (discussed in detail in a prior Orrick Employment blog post here), one of many new laws imposing significant new requirements on federal contractors. Representatives of the Professional Services Council met with Secretary of Labor Tom Perez and White House officials to urge changes to the Order, which (among other things) requires prospective federal contractors and subcontractors to track and report a comprehensive list of labor and employment law violations, bars larger existing contractors from requiring pre-dispute arbitration agreements of certain claims (including claims under Title VII), and requires contractors to provide employees with additional information on overtime and hours worked in paychecks. READ MORE
In an unwelcome, mid-summer surprise for the business community, President Obama signed the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive Order on Thursday July 31, 2014 requiring federal contractors to report violations of federal and state labor and employment laws and prohibiting certain contractors from requiring that employees arbitrate disputes alleging violations of Title VII or claims for sexual assault or harassment. The Executive Order also requires federal contractors to provide relevant information about hours worked and overtime on employee paychecks.
