Labor and Employment Law Attorneys in America

United States labor law is a heterogeneous collection of state and federal laws. Federal law not only sets the standards that govern workers' rights to organize in the private sector, but overrides most state and local laws that attempt to regulate this area. Federal law also provides more limited rights for employees of the federal government. These federal laws do not, on the other hand, apply to employees of state and local governments, agricultural workers or domestic employees; any statutory protections those workers have derived from state law.

The pattern is even more mixed in the area of wages and working conditions. Federal law establishes minimum wages and overtime rights for most workers in the private and public sectors; state and local laws may provide more expansive rights, Similarly, federal law provides minimum workplace safety standards, but allows the states to take over those responsibilities and to provide more stringent standards.

Finally, both federal and state laws protect workers from employment discrimination. In most areas these two bodies of law overlap; as an example, federal law permits state to enact their own statutes barring discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion, national origin and age, so long as the state law does not provide less protections than federal law would. Federal law, on the other hand, preempts most state statutes that would bar employers from discriminating against employees to prevent them from obtaining pensions or other benefits or retaliating against them for asserting those rights.

PleaseGetMeAnAttorney.com can help you find an experienced Labor and Employment attorney. We have the best Labor and Employment Attorneys in America.

(please fill out the form to the right)

Regulation of wages, benefits and working conditions

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 establishes minimum wage and overtime rights for most private sector workers, with a number of exemptions and exceptions. Congress amended the Act in 1974 to cover governmental employees, leading to a series of United States Supreme Court decisions in which the Court first held that the law was unconstitutional, then reversed itself to permit the FLSA to cover governmental employees.

The FLSA does not preempt state and local governments from providing greater protections under their own laws. A number of states have enacted higher minimum wages and extended their laws to cover workers who are excluded under the FLSA or to provide rights that federal law ignores. Local governments have also adopted a number of "living wage" laws that require those employers that contract with them to pay higher minimum wages and benefits to their employees. The federal government, along with many state governments, likewise requires employers to pay the prevailing wage, which typically reflects the standards established by unions' collective bargaining agreements in the area, to workers on public works projects.

The Employee Retirement Income Security Act establishes standards for the funding and operation of pension and health care plans provided by employers to their employees. ERISA preempts most state legislation that attempts to regulate how such plans are administered and, to a great extent, what types of health care coverage they provide. ERISA also preempts state law claims that an employer discriminated against employees in order to prevent them from obtaining the benefits they would have earned otherwise or to retaliate against them for asserting their rights.

The Family and Medical Leave Act, passed in 1993, requires employers to provide workers with twelve weeks of unpaid medical leave and continuing medical benefit coverage in order to attend to certain medical conditions of close relatives or themselves. Many states have comparable statutory provisions; some states have offered greater protections.

The Occupational Safety and Health Act, signed into law in 1970 by President Richard Nixon, created specific standards for workplace safety. The Act has spawned years of litigation by industry groups that have challenged the standards limiting the amount of permitted exposure to chemicals such as benzene. The Act also provides for protection for "whistleblowers" who complain to governmental authorities about unsafe conditions while allowing workers the right to refuse to work under unsafe conditions in certain circumstances.

The Act allows states to take over the administration of OSHA in their jurisdictions, so long as they adopt state laws at least as protective of workers' rights as under federal law. More than half of the states have done so.

PleaseGetMeAnAttorney.com can help you find an experienced Labor and Employment attorney. We have the best Labor and Employment Attorneys in America.

(please fill out the form to the right)

Employment discrimination and whistleblowers

While Congress passed laws barring racial discrimination by private employers in 1866 with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Supreme Court's decision in the Civil Rights Cases made that Act a dead letter for nearly a century. Congress adopted limited prohibitions against racial discrimination by defense contractors during World War II, but no general prohibition against employment discrimination until it passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employment discrimination on the basis of race, gender, national origin and religion. Congress amended that Act in 1972 to cover governmental employers, in 1981 to outlaw employment discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, and again in the Civil Rights Act of 1991 to overturn a number of decisions by the Supreme Court limiting employees' rights.

Congress has also protected the rights of workers over forty years of age in the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, passed in 1967, and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 also provided narrow prohibitions against certain types of employment discrimination based on immigration status.

Title VII encourages states to pass their own anti-discrimination laws; most states outside the South have done so. A number of states and local governments have also enacted statutes that expand on the rights that federal law offers, either by offering greater remedies or broader protections, or have legislated in areas that federal law does not cover, such as discrimination based on sexual orientation or marital status.

The states and the federal government have also enacted a welter of laws to protect whistleblowers; these statutes vary widely in what conduct is protected, what procedures must be followed to enforce the law and what remedies are provided. Public sector employees are also protected from retaliation by their employers for some forms of whistle-blowing activities by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

PleaseGetMeAnAttorney.com can help you find an experienced Labor and Employment attorney. We have the best Labor and Employment Attorneys in America.

Call Toll free 1-800-231-8857