The Rocky Mountain Employer

The Denver City Council has passed an ordinance that incrementally raises the minimum wage for workers employed by city contractors and subcontractors to $15 an hour by 2021. As described below, the ordinance covers a broad range of contractors and in some cases applies to contracts signed before the ordinance was passed.

The United States Department of Labor (“DOL”) has taken the position that an employer must designate any leave of absence that qualifies under the Family and Medical Leave Act (“FMLA”) as FMLA leave, even if an employee wants to first exhaust paid time off benefits.

A bill that would (1) prohibit Colorado employers from considering a job applicant’s past salary history when determining her pay rate, (2) require employers to post jobs openings (and the wage rate for such job openings) to all employees, and (3) allow employees to recover up to three years of back pay for unequal pay, plus liquidated damages and attorneys’ fees, is moving forward in the Colorado Senate.

The Colorado General Assembly is considering a “ban the box” bill that would prohibit employers from inquiring about applicants’ criminal histories in initial applications, and prohibit advertisements stating those with criminal histories may not apply. The underlying policy for this legislation, which several states have enacted, is to reduce the number of otherwise qualified individuals from not applying for gainful employment because of criminal issues in their past.

In the wake of heightened focus on sexual harassment in the workplace, employers may find it more difficult to have even weak harassment cases dismissed before trial. This proved to be the case in Minarsky v. Susquehanna County, where a federal appeals court ruled that an employee’s failure to utilize her employer’s harassment reporting procedures was reasonable and did not prevent the employer from potentially being liable for years’-long harassment.

The U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether federal courts have the power to review claims brought under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (“Title VII”) if the plaintiff did not first file a charge of discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) or an equivalent state agency.

In a unanimous opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court held this week that where an agreement gives an arbitrator authority to decide what disputes must be arbitrated, courts may not refuse to send a case to arbitration even if it is clear from the terms of the contract that the request to arbitrate is “wholly groundless.”

Colorado’s 2019 Legislative Session begins January 4, 2019, and, with a new Democratic governor and the Democratic party controlling both chambers of the General Assembly, we expect to see the introduction of numerous workplace and arbitration related bills with potentially far-reaching, and onerous, effects on employers. The following bills, which failed in previous years, likely will be the focus of serious debate between now and late May 2019, when the legislative session is scheduled to end:

The partial government shutdown, which began December 22, 2018 and has caused hundreds of thousands of federal workers to stop working or work without pay, has begun to affect private employers who are not government contractors, and employees of such companies, in the following ways: