Transit Benefits Required for Illinois Employers
Another wrinkle for employers in the Chicago area.
Businesses located in the six-county Chicago area near public transit routes operated by the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) that have at least 50 employees will be required as of Jan. 1, 2024, to provide their full-time employees with pre-tax public transit benefits.
Long-Term Temps to be Paid Like Employees
Both Illinois employers that contract with temporary labor service agencies, and those agencies themselves that do business in the state, should review staffing contracts and ensure compliance with relevant policies and procedures under amendments to the Illinois Day and Temporary Labor Services Act signed by Governor J.B. Pritzker, which took effect immediately.
The amendments to HB 2862 hold that temporary workers assigned to a third-party client for more than 90 days are entitled to wages and benefits—or the cash equivalent of benefits—equivalent to the lowest-paid employee at that client who performs the “same or substantially similar” work. If no such person exists, temp workers must be paid the same as the lowest-paid employee with the closest seniority level to the temp.
Supreme Court Ruling on Religious Reasons
Small businesses and other employers are likely to find it more difficult to refuse requests for religious accommodations after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in a recent case, Groff v. DeJoy, which concerned a postal worker who unsuccessfully requested to be off-the-clock every Sunday—when the post office still makes deliveries for Amazon—citing his Evangelical Christian faith.
Gerald Groff, a Pennsylvania man, nonetheless kept being put on the schedule for Sundays and disciplined for not working while his co-workers were stretched thin attempting to cover his routes. He resigned, sued, lost his case and lost again on appeal—but the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in June established a higher standard for employers who claimed they would face an “undue hardship” to make religious accommodations.
You Can, But Should You?
To begin with, employers thinking about using AI such as ChatGPT during hiring and selection need to familiarize themselves with the technology at a conceptual level, and then look closely at—and understand well enough so they can explain to others—how AI integrates with their recruiting tools and practices.
A key piece of state legislation in Illinois pertaining to the use of AI is the Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act (820 ILCS 42/1), which lays down various stipulations for the recording of video interviews and subsequent use of AI while evaluating said recordings.
How to Avoid Crypto-Scams
Do you accept cryptocurrency in exchange for your company’s goods and services?
Or are you thinking about it?
The pros and cons of accepting Bitcoin and other online payments for small businesses
What are the risks of small businesses taking payments in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies? What are the rewards?
But first, for the uninitiated, what are cryptocurrencies in the first place? They are decentralized digital exchange media that enable buyer-to-seller transactions to take place without a bank or other third-party processor involved. No matter how small your business is, you can take payments over this medium, as more than 30% of U.S. small businesses now do, according to data from Skynova. Bitcoin and Etherium are among the most commonly used.
Can You Keep a Secret?
At the federal level, the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 created a pathway for civil action due to misappropriation of trade secrets; federal courts also can rule on criminal trade secret actions based on the Economic Espionage Act of 1996.
The UTSA defines a trade secret as information with actual or potential independent economic value, based on the facts that potential competitors don’t know about it and don’t have the proper means to obtain it; and that “reasonable” efforts are being made to keep that information secret. The information in question can take the form of a formula, pattern, compilation, program, device, method, technique or process.
2023 Business Outlook
2022 started out with the hope of a recovery from the pandemic but ended with a recession. With the advent of 2023 we are left to ponder on what is ahead for businesses in 2023.
It’s the Recession, Stupid: The war in Ukraine has affected the world economy which was struggling with recovery after the pandemic. Interest rates have increased which has adversely affected the real estate market and businesses which are facing higher operating costs and higher costs for loans. We may see more businesses shut down because of the increased costs or an inability to pay off their loans. It is doubtful that we will seen interest rates rise to the levels we saw in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. I recall thinking I was fortunate to get a mortgage rate of 13.5% on my first home purchase in 1979! Businesses will need to carefully monitor their cash flow and receivables.
Are NDAs for Sexual Harassment dead?
Employers will no longer be able to require workers to sign upfront non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) pertaining to sexual harassment incidents they have experienced or witnessed under new federal legislation that passed overwhelmingly through Congress and signed into law by President Biden on December 7.
One operative word here is “upfront.” The Speak Out Act does not prohibit businesses from negotiating for NDAs that cover sexual harassment as part of a court settlement. It simply means that aggrieved employees will need to speak out before filing any potential lawsuit that could lead to an NDA prohibiting them from doing so. The new legislation also does not apply retroactively, so employers that previously had NDAs in place will not suddenly be faced with a flood of public allegations from prior to the legislation’s signing; the prohibition on upfront NDAs applies only going forward.
Buyer of Nontraditional Legal Services, Beware
All kinds of business forms are offered online, and many of them for free. Stand-alone paralegal services are offering various sorts of assistance to small businesses for significantly less than lawyers generally charge. Accounting and bookkeeping services that organize businesses are increasingly positioning themselves as trusted enterprise advisers in ways that potentially can spill over into law-related issues. And the cost of litigation continues to grow.
It’s thus understandable at some level that small business owners, who operate on modest margins in many cases, would ponder how much they need to continue to rely on their traditional partners in the legal world for the same level of services they typically have in the past and look to the web find alternatives to the services of a lawyer.
Chicago Business Attorney Blog