Question Does a private employer have an obligation to accommodate a religious employee who wants to exercise his/her religion within the workplace? Answer Depending on the size of the employer, the employer may have an obligation to provide a reasonable accommodation to an employee who wants to exercise his or her religion within the office. …
Question Can a private employer terminate an employee who is arrested outside of normal work hours, but has not yet been convicted of any crime, without facing possible employment law exposure? Answer North Carolina is an “at will” employment state, meaning an employer can terminate an employee for any reason at all, as long as…
Over the last year, we have seen an uptick in claimant attorneys requesting a second opinion on treatment options under N.C. Gen. Stat. § 97-25(b) and that defendants 1) issue a prepayment for that visit and 2) pay beyond the NCIC fee schedule amount for the visit. Claimant attorneys argue there are not any medical…
On June 15, 2020, the Supreme Court of the United States published an opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County resolving the dispute among the Courts of Appeals over the scope of Title VII’s protections for homosexual and transgender persons. In the 6-3 decision, the Court held Title VII prohibits an employer from discriminating against an…
In 1988, Congress passed the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act to provide workers with time to prepare for the transition between the jobs they currently hold and new jobs when large employers are going to shut down their facilities or perform mass layoffs. As companies have been forced to shut their doors and…
On June 3, 2019, the United States Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9-0 Opinion in Fort Bend County v. Davis that a complainant who fails to file a charge with the EEOC before filing a lawsuit against an employer does not create a jurisdictional defense for the defendants. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act…
Every employer has been there before. You hire a new employee and everything is going smoothly, until one day you receive a letter from the North Carolina Department of Revenue compelling you to withhold an amount from your new employee’s paychecks to satisfy an outstanding tax obligation the employee owes. In the boilerplate of that…
Starting on December 31, 2017, the North Carolina Industrial Commission will have a permanent Employee Classification Section charged with investigating and punishing employers who misclassify employees as independent contractors. The Employee Classification Section was initially created through an executive order signed by former Governor Pat McCrory on December 18, 2015, Executive Order No. 83. The…
If you have worked on the defense side of workers’ compensation claims for any period of time, the above headline likely sounds like a work of fiction. While we have all heard of the elaborate measures the NCIC Fraud Investigation Unit takes to prosecute employers who fail to maintain proper insurance coverage, the idea of…
A List of Do’s and Do Not’s for North Carolina General Contractors in a post-Salinas Era. In Salinas v. Commercial Interiors, Inc., 848 F.3d 125 (4th Cir. 2017), the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals laid out a new test for determining when two or more individuals or corporate entities should be considered “joint employers” of…