• New laws. Starting with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act — the first bill signed into law by President Obama — Congress has had a busy year. It passed a law providing partial subsidies for COBRA continuing health care coverage, then extended it into 2010. Congress also expanded the newly passed military family leave provisions of the FMLA. Add to that the laws passed in 2008 that became effective last year: the ADAAA and GINA.
• New Supreme Court cases. Last year, the Supreme Court a handful of cases on retaliation, age discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, and race discrimination.
• New regulations. Proposed and final regulations were issued for the FMLA, the ADAAA, GINA

And 2010 could be another big year: In my next post, I’ll talk about some of the changes that might be in the pipeline. Stay tuned.

Source: 2009: The Year in Employment Law

Jeff Quon was a segeant on the Ontario, California SWAT team. He was given a pager with wireless text-messaging capability for work, and was told that the department’s email policy — which gave the city the right to monitor, prohibited personal use, and told employees their messages were not private — applied to the pagers. However, the lieutenant in charge of administering employee use of the pagers said something different: He told employees that each pager was allotted 25,000 characters per month, and that employee use of the pagers would not be audited as long as employees paid any overage charges for their accounts.

For eight months, the department did not audit anyone’s pager messages. During this time, Quon exceeded the overage limit several times, and paid for his extra usage. When Quon and another officer again went over the limit, the chief decided to audit the use of certain pagers (including Quon’s) to figure out whether the city should increase its 25,000 character allotment and whether the officers were using their pagers for personal reasons. The city asked its carrier (the Arch Wireless of the case title) to provide transcripts of the messages on the selected pagers, and found that many of Quon’s messages were personal and some were sexually explicit. Quon, his wife, and two others with whom he exchanged text messages than sued for violation of their privacy rights.

The Ninth Circuit found against the city. Despite the written policy, the court found that the lieutenant’s statement that he would not read their messages, combined with his practice of actually not reading messages for months, gave Quon and the others a reasonable expectation of privacy in their messages. The court also found that, even though the city’s rationale for reading the messages was reasonable, it could have achieved that goal without reading the messages by, for example, warning Quon in advance that his pager would be audited, asking Quon to delete his personal messages, or asking Quon to count the work-related characters himself. Because there were less intrusive ways to find out what was going on with the pager accounts, the city’s decision to read the messages was a privacy violation.

Because Quon involves a government employer, the Fourth Amendment (which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures) applies. The Fourth Amendment doesn’t protect private employees, so the court’s decision in Quon won’t explicitly extend to the private sector. But it will be highly influential: Courts have generally followed similar standards in analyzing privacy claims against private employers. The case will also have wide resonance because it will be the Court’s first foray (as far as I can tell) into modern workplace monitoring — the kind that involves electronic and digital communication, not phone calls and locker searches.

It’s not surprising that the Ninth Circuit is one of the few courts to find in favor of an employee’s privacy claim. The Ninth Circuit is still known as one of the more liberal — and protective of civil liberties — in the nation. And, the judges of the Ninth Circuit, themselves federal employees, have not taken kindly to the monitoring of their own communications: Almost a decade ago, the judges disabled the monitoring software on their own computer systems to protest an announced policy stating that court employees had no right to privacy in their email messages and Internet activities. That part of the policy was later withdrawn, in part because of the attention drawn to it by the Ninth Circuit protest.

Source: Supreme Court to Hear Text Message Privacy Case

The Unified Agenda can be somewhat daunting, both in length and in jargon (OMB Watch, a nonprofit that works to promote greater transparency in federal regulatory and budget matters, has a nice guide to some of the terms used in the Unified Agenda). Each federal agency that’s included in the Unified Agenda must indicate what rulemaking it has planned in coming months. The list of agencies in the current Unified Agenda is here; when you click on an agency’s link, you can see its statement.

The EEOC has identified two regulatory priorities:

1. Implementing the employment provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act (ADAAA). The EEOC issued proposed regulations on the ADAAA in September 2009 (you can check out my blog post reviewing the regs here), and asked for public comments to be submitted by November 23. Now, the agency must review all of those comments and come up with final regulations.
2. Amending its regulations on the “reasonable factor other than age” defense to an age discrimination claim under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), an issue the Supreme Court addressed last year. (Here’s my blog post on that case, Meacham v. Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory.)

The Department of Labor painted with a broader brush: It begins its regulatory plan with a sort of mission statement, lising 12 “strategic outcomes,” from improving health benefits to helping injured workers return to the job, all intended to further the agency’s goal of ”good jobs for everyone.” Here are the specific regulatory proposals that interested me:

1. Updates to the child labor regulations.
2. A review of the military leave provisions and the 2009 regulations interpreting the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).
3. Changes to the record keeping regulation for Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). 

Source: Regulatory Agenda: ADA, ADEA, FMLA, and Record Keeping Requirements

We’re staying about 200 yards down the Royal Mile from Adam Smith’s new statue, unveiled 4 July 2008, and about 400 yards up from his gravesite in the Canondale Kirk yard.  The statue is bronze, 10′ tall, and prominently situated in front of St. Giles church, Behind him is a plough, said to symbolize the impact of his thinking on the eclipse of agrarian economies, and to his right is a beehive, symbolizing, of course, the invisible hand of unguided individual effort creating without a centralized authority something greater than the sum of the individuals alone.

Source: Adam Smith’s Home Town

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