Mark J. Swerdlin

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keys-minFor nearly 35 years, automobile dealers relied on the U.S. Department of Labor’s position that service advisors fell within the Fair Labor Standards Act’s exemption from overtime for “salesmen, partsmen, or mechanics primarily engaged in selling or servicing automobiles.” In 2011, the DOL “upended” this interpretation by issuing regulations specifying that the exemption did not apply to “sales personnel” unless they sell vehicles.  Thus, service advisors were deemed non-exempt.

In June 2016, in Encino Motorcars, LLC v. Navarro, No. 15-415, 2016 WL 3369424 (2016), the Supreme Court held that the 2011 regulation was not entitled to deference because it was issued without the requisite reasoned explanation for a change.  The Court did not decide whether service advisors are, or are not, exempt.  The U.S. Supreme Court remanded the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (which had decided the case below) with instructions that the appellate court not give any deference to the DOL’s regulations.  In other words, the appellate court should review the duties of the position (the sale of repair and maintenance services) and decide if the duties fell within the statutory exemption.…

Continue Reading Automobile Service Advisors: Exempt or Non-Exempt

auction-gavel-HpmTks-clipartAs you may remember, Shawe Rosenthal joined with other law firms in Worklaw® Network in a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Labor to block its implementation of the controversial “persuader rule” in order to protect your right to seek counsel on employment, labor and HR matters with privacy and confidentiality. Here’s a brief recap of the milestones:…
Continue Reading Persuader Rule Lawsuit Update

Today, December 1, 2016, the Department of Labor issued a press release announcing that it had filed an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit of the emergency nationwide injunction of the new overtime rule, which had been granted last week by Judge Amos Mazzant, as discussed in our November 23…

jpgThis week, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) published an updated I-9 Form on its website, which can be accessed here.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act prohibits employers from hiring people without first identifying their identity and employment authorization.  The I-9 Form is the mechanism to achieve that.  Employers are required to complete the I-9 Form within three days of the first day of work for all new hires.

By January 22, 2017, all employers will need to be using the revised form for all new hires.  Until then, employers can either continue to use the current version, which is dated 03/08/2013, or they can use the new version.  The version date is located at the bottom left corner of the form.…

Continue Reading USCIS Issues New I-9 Form

Imagine this: Your cobook 2mpany has policies in your employee handbook determined to be unlawful by the NLRB.  Then, you and the NLRB engage in a line-by-line revision of the policies to ensure compliance with Board law and thereafter you issue a new handbook, with policies approved by the Board, to your employees.  Everything is ok, right? Wrong!  This is exactly what occurred in Boch Imports, Inc. v. National Labor Relations Board.  In affirming the NLRB, the First Circuit determined that the Employer failed to properly repudiate its prior, unlawful handbook policies even though it revised those policies in collaboration with the NLRB Regional Office.
Continue Reading Must Employers Repudiate Unlawful Handbook Policies?

“I’ve known Bob Rumson for years and I’ve been operating under the assumption that the reason Bob devotes so much time to shouting at the rain was that he simply didn’t get it.  Well, I was wrong.  Bob’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t get it.  Bob’s problem is that he can’t sell it.”

President Andrew Shepherd (played by Michael Douglas) in The American President.

The NLRB’s Quickie Election Rule just celebrated its first anniversary and you know what?  The union election win rate remained the same–about 65%.  The total number of union petitions filed to hold elections jumped all the way from 2,141 in the year before the new Rule up to 2,144 last year– a “whopping” gain of 3 elections.   NLRB statistics do confirm that the median time from the filing a petition to the election decreased substantially, from 38 days down to 24 days. …
Continue Reading NLRB’s Quickie Election Rule Turns One

On March 23, 2016, the Department of Labor released the long-pending revisions to the “persuader rule,” drastically expanding employers’ disclosure requirements regarding their use of union avoidance consultants, including attorneys as well as HR consultants and media specialists. Our firm, on behalf of Worklaw, an international management-side network of labor and employment firms, will be filing suit to block implementation of the rule.

Under the “persuader rule” in the Labor-Management Reporting Disclosure Act of 1959 (LMRDA), employers are required to file reports and disclose expenditures to the DOL each time they engage a consultant to persuade employees regarding employees’ rights to organize. However, the LMRDA provides an “advice exception,” which had been interpreted for over 50 years to exclude an employer’s discussions with its labor relations consultants – including legal counsel – regarding opposition to a union organizing campaign, as long as the consultants had no direct contact with employees.

Under the new rule, however, the scope of an employer’s reporting obligations under the LMRDA has been substantially expanded, and will include a broad range of activities beyond “direct contact” provided by labor relations consultants – including attorneys. The intent of this one-sided rule is to discourage employers from retaining such consultants, and thereby promote unionization.
Continue Reading DOL Issues Persuader Rule

Whether Auto Dealer Service Writers (also called Service Advisors) are exempt from federal and state overtime pay requirements has been an issue for years. The U.S. Department of Labor (“DOL”) has flip-flopped on the issue since the exemption for “any salesman, partsman, or mechanic primarily engaged in selling or servicing automobiles” was written into the…

Absent an injunction issuing in one of the pending cases challenging the National Labor Relations Board’s Final Rule substantially revising its representation case procedures, the rules become effective April 14, 2015. The practical effect is that representation elections will be held in a shorter period of time, which reduces the ability of employers to educate…