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On August 22, 2023, the Attorney General for the District of Columbia, Brian L. Schwalb, sued Swahili Village, which serves East African cuisine on M Street, NW, in D.C. Superior Court for an array of wage and hour and other violations, including systematically violating the District’s minimum wage and overtime provisions.

Earlier this month, in Hamilton v. Dallas County, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which has appellate jurisdiction in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, reversed three decades of its precedent and significantly expanded the conduct that is actionable discrimination pursuant to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

A federal appellate court upheld a jury finding that the City of New York recklessly failed to pay FDNY EMTs and paramedics pre-shift and post-shift overtime.

NEW YORK, NY– On August 25, 2023, the Second Circuit upheld the 2019 findings of a unanimous jury verdict in favor of the plaintiffs, 2,519 EMTs and Paramedics employed by the FDNY and the City of New York, in an action brought pursuant to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (covering New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware) ruled that time employees spend changing clothes and putting on protective gear may be compensable even if the employees have the option of doing so at home.

On August 11, 2023, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit overturned a lower court’s decision that St. Luke’s Health System, Inc.’s time rounding policy followed the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”). The Eighth Circuit ruled that a health care system, like a hospital, cannot prevail on claims that a compensable time- rounding system was following the Fair Labor Standards Act when the workers are underpaid overall.

Earlier this month, a federal judge in Georgia agreed to pause (or “stay”) proceedings alleging that consulting firm Horizon Actuarial Services, LLC failed to protect retirement plan participants’ personal information from a data breach in November 2021, so that the parties could finalize a settlement of those claims.

On August 7, 2023, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to implement the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA). The PWFA expands workplace protections to pregnant workers and requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations for pregnancy-related conditions.

On July 27, 2023, a federal judge in Colorado denied DaVita, Inc.’s motion to dismiss class action claims that it breached its fiduciary duty to its 401(k) plan by allowing higher-than-average recordkeeping costs and offering investment funds with higher-than-necessary management fees.

A former dockworker filed a class action lawsuit against Yellow Corp., after the company laid him and approximately 30,000 other workers off without advanced notice starting on July 28, 2023. Before it shut down operations on July 30, Yellow Corp. was the third-largest less than truckload (“LTL”) provider in the United States.

August 5, 2023, marks 30 years from the date the Family and Medical Leave Act (“FMLA”) of 1993 went fully into effect. Signed into law on February 5, 1993, by newly-inaugurated President Bill Clinton, the FMLA gave American workers the right to take time off work to care for themselves and their family members, without giving up their livelihood in the process.