McNees’ Benefits Group will be issuing a “Did you know?” series throughout the year providing short compliance reminders. Did you know that qualified retirement plans may now allow a participant with a terminal illness to receive distributions from their retirement accounts without incurring the usual 10% penalty? The employer will need to amend the retirement plan to allow for such distributions. For more information regarding compliance for your benefit plans, contact any member of the McNees Labor and Employment Group ..read more

Now more than ever, it seems that employees are willing to express themselves.  While open communication with and among employees is usually a good thing, sometimes an employer’s rules are broken in the process.  A worker might call her supervisor a nasty name while complaining about her production team’s overtime assignments.  An employee could use profanity to describe working conditions in a social media post in which he also asks his co-workers to join a labor union. A striking employee may threaten a company executive while picketing. In such cases, an employer is likely to ..read more

McNees’ Benefits Group will be issuing a “Did you know?” series throughout the year providing short compliance reminders. Did you know that group health plans are required to submit a gag clause prohibition compliance attestation to the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Treasury prior to December 31, 2023?  The annual attestation provides that the group health plan has not, since December 27, 2020, entered into and will not enter into a contract with a health care provider, third-party administrator, or other service provider offering access to a network of providers th ..read more

We have posted about employer use of Artificial Intelligence, AI, and the emerging legal issues associated with such tools, and no doubt, AI is going to continue to be a hot topic.  The growth of AI tools and their usage across industries has been explosive. Recently, we attended a Webinar on Chat GPT and learned more about the awesome power of this technology.  We walked away very impressed, and even a little scared of its capabilities.  One key takeaway: while Chat GPT may be a good way to start a project, at this point, employers should be sure to use REAL intelligence to rev ..read more

McNees’ Benefits Group will be issuing a “Did you know?” series throughout the year providing short compliance reminders. Did you know that an employer must issue an updated summary plan description (“SPD”) at least every five (5) years that contains all recent amendments? If there were no amendments to the SPD, then the SPD must be reissued every 10 years. For more information regarding compliance for your benefit plans, contact any member of the McNees Labor and Employment Group ..read more

On January 10, 2023, Lancaster County Court of Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Wright addressed the question that has been plaguing employers since the passage of the PA Medical Marijuana Act (the “Act”) – what constitutes being “under the influence” for purposes of the Act’s safety exception?  As a reminder, when the Act was passed, the legislature included a broad safety exception within Sections 510(3) & (4) of the Act, which provides: A patient may be prohibited by an employer from performing any task which the employer deems life-threatening, to either the employee or any of the emplo ..read more

After the pandemic began to ease, and labor availability was the lowest in recent history, many employees found themselves working more and more to fill the gaps in the workforce.  That led to the trend popularized a year ago called “quiet quitting.”  Under its tamest definition, quiet quitting was/is a practice where employees only did their own job duties – not the duties of multiple employees. Now, quiet quitting has morphed into a new trend: “bare minimum Mondays.” Bare minimum Mondays is not just employees limiting their work to the duties of their specific job.  It goes fu ..read more

McNees’ Benefits Group will be issuing a “Did you know?” series throughout the year providing short compliance reminders.  This is the first in the series. Did you know that if you withhold premium payments pre-tax from employee wages, you must have a cafeteria plan (also called 125 plan)?  If you do not have a cafeteria plan, then your employees owe taxes on the premiums withheld. For more information regarding cafeteria plans, contact any member of the McNees Labor and Employment Group ..read more

As part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, Congress passed two new pregnancy-related laws requiring covered employers to provide reasonable accommodations to employees due to pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions. The two new laws are the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA), effective June 27, 2023, and the Providing Urgent Maternal Protections for Nursing Mothers Act (PUMP Act), effective April 28, 2023. These laws will generally enhance the protections afforded to pregnant employees and create new compliance obligations for employers. The PWFA will require emplo ..read more

On January 5, 2023, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) issued a Notice of Proposed Rule Making and additional information describing a new proposed rule that would prohibit employers across the country from entering into non-compete agreements with their workforce. The FTC’s press release and related information on the proposed rule can be found here. The FTC’s proposed rule is in response to a prior Executive Order from President Biden, which, among other things, encouraged the FTC to use its rule-making authority to “to curtail the unfair use of non-compete clauses and other clauses or agr ..read more