In the wake of the pandemic and global adoption of teleworking, an increasing number of employees are looking to work remotely abroad. Unfortunately, the law is not as flexible as technology. It may be very easy for employees to work abroad in practice, but there are a number of potential legal pitfalls that can create risks for employers.
On September 13, 2022, the German Federal Labor Court (Bundesarbeitsgericht) ruled (1 ABR 22/21) that employers are required to record the working hours of their employees. According to the Federal Labor Court, a comprehensive obligation to record working hours cannot be derived from the Working Hours Act; however, such an obligation follows from the mandatory interpretation of occupational health and safety regulations in conformity with European law. The decision of the Federal Labor Court has caused uncertainty among employers.
On December 14, 2022, Mexico’s Senate of the Republic approved the final project to modify Articles 76 and 78 of the Federal Labor Law (FLL), under which employees will be entitled to more mandatory and paid vacation days.
On 22 September 2022, the UK Government published the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill 2022. Under the bill, all retained European Union law would be revoked on 31 December 2023 (the sunset date) or at a later date prior to 23 June 2026 (the ten-year anniversary of Brexit) unless specific steps are taken to retain it.
As of November 23, 2022, the German Federal State of Hesse no longer requires an obligatory isolation period for persons who have tested positive for COVID-19.
Employers in Finland have a deadline of December 31, 2022, to double-check their pre-2022 employment contracts for noncompetition clauses and to waive them before the end of the transition year, if necessary.
On December 1, 2022, Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador announced that, unanimously, the business and labor sectors, as well as the government, had agreed to increase the minimum wage by 20 percent for 2023, which will be applicable in the Free Zone of the Northern Border (Zona Libre de la Frontera Norte or ZLFN), as well as the wage applicable in the rest of the country.
On October 25, 2022, U.S. professional basketball player Brittney Griner lost her bid in a Russian appeals court to overturn a nine-year sentence for attempting to smuggle illegal drugs into Russia. According to reports, Griner, a Women’s National Basketball Association star and two-time Olympic gold medalist, was arrested at a Russian airport in February 2022 while attempting to enter the country to play professional basketball with vaporizer cartridges containing less than one gram of hashish oil, a product derived from marijuana. Griner reportedly has a prescription for medical marijuana in Arizona, but marijuana, including medical marijuana, remains illegal in Russia.
A collision between the Ontario government and unionized education workers escalated into one of the most significant moments in recent Canadian labour relations history.
Canada is considering implementing new laws regarding supply-chain due diligence and other obligations relating to forced labour and child labour. In late 2021, Canadian Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne introduced Bill S-211, An Act to enact the Fighting Against Forced Labour and Child Labour in Supply Chains Act and to amend the Customs Tariff. It has since passed the Senate, and moved to the House of Commons where it is likely to pass and receive Royal Assent, becoming law.
After several months of discussion and uncertainty, on November 3, 2022, Mexico’s Senate of the Republic approved a bill that would modify articles 76 and 78 of Mexico’s Federal Labor Law (FLL) to entitle employees to more paid vacation days.
This fall and winter season, employers in Germany have several developments in German employment law to put on their radars, including optional bonus pay due to the spike in energy costs; workplace safety and health measures related to heat, and separately, COVID-19; and annual leave entitlements.
On September 28, 2022, Governor Pedro Pierluisi of Puerto Rico signed Law Number 82-2022 into law, amending Puerto Rico’s sexual harassment statute to require private employers to issue and implement specific protocols to manage sexual harassment incidents in their workplaces.
On October 6, 2021, the Act to modernize the occupational health and safety regime took effect. As indicated in the act’s title, its purpose was to modernize Québec’s occupational health and safety regime with regard to the prevention and compensation of employment injuries.
On October 7, 2022, President Biden signed Executive Order (EO) 14086, “Enhancing Safeguards for United States Signals Intelligence Activities,” which provides a new framework for legal data transfers between the European Union (EU) and the United States.
Paid annual leave days in Germany have been the subject of several recent decisions by the European Court of Justice (ECJ), with the Luxembourg-based judges regularly opposing previous case law of the Federal Labor Court regarding paid annual leave. The ECJ’s concerns have centered on the forfeiture provisions in Germany’s Federal Paid Leave Act, among other things.
On October 3, 2022, the last phase of the implementation of Mexico’s Federal Labor Law of 2019 (the “Labor Reform”) amendment became effective, and, consequently, a new labor process before the courts is now a reality in Mexico.
Understanding the intricacies of local labor laws is critical for any business with operations in multiple countries or looking to establish operations in a new country. This is especially true for laws regulating or mandating vacation time as many countries, such as Brazil, have systems that differ from what employers may be accustomed to in the United States. Failure to rigorously comply with these laws could force employers to pay costly penalties and allow employees to use up large amounts of accrued vacation time.
On October 7, 2022, Canadian Minister of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship, the Honourable Sean Fraser, announced a pilot project to temporarily lift the weekly twenty-hour off-campus working limit for international students studying full-time in Canada. The pilot project is set to last just over a year, from November 15, 2022, until December 31, 2023.
Under the Working for Workers’ Act, every covered Ontario employer with twenty-five or more employees is now required to have a written electronic monitoring policy that complies with Part XI.1 of the Employment Standards Act, 2000.
Multistate employers often face the difficult task of finding the most effective way to prepare their handbooks while ensuring compliance not only with federal law, but also with the applicable state, local, and even international laws of the jurisdictions in which they operate. As many multistate employers continue to grow and expand their footprints both nationally and internationally, and as remote work becomes more common across industries, this is one of the challenges they are facing, especially where state laws are quickly evolving.
On October 4, 2022, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO), released its decision in Weilgosh v. London District Catholic School Board. This HRTO decision was highly anticipated, following the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Northern Regional Health Authority v. Horrocks, in 2021. The Court in Horrocks concluded that unionized employees in Manitoba may not file human rights complaints with the Manitoba Human Rights Commission.
While a global contingent workforce may be an extension of a company’s internal workforce for all practical purposes, legally, it is a separate and distinct group of nonemployees. That can create a number of obstacles for employers, particularly when the contingent workers are located outside the United States.
Employment laws in every country have anomalies that can catch employers off-guard because they do not seem to make sense—until you look under the surface. Three examples of this are from Italy, the Netherlands, and Australia, involving rules governing voluntary employment resignations in Italy to vacation leave accruals in the Netherlands to surprising redundancy pay entitlements in Australia. Here is a quick look at some fascinating features of these countries’ laws.
The Government of Canada announced, on Monday, September 26, 2022, that after Friday, September 30, 2022, all requirements related to COVID-19 for entering into Canada will expire.
The German government’s plans and actions to address the COVID-19 pandemic in the coming months are becoming more concrete. On September 8, 2022, the German parliament passed new measures aimed at fighting the spread of COVID-19 this fall and winter. This legislative initiative included rewriting the SARS-CoV-2 Occupational Health and Safety Regulation, which is scheduled to be in effect from October 1, 2022, through April 7, 2023.
A recent decision of the German Federal Labor Court (Bundesarbeitsgericht) shows yet again that the issue of working time remains highly fraught for German employers. Following a 2019 ruling of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) setting forth an obligation on the part of European Union employers to establish objective, reliable, and accessible systems for recording their employees’ daily working time, the subject of working time became a widely discussed topic throughout Germany. The Federal Labor Court effectively put an end to such discussions with its decision of September 13, 2022.
On September 13, 2022, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared September 19, 2022, a federal holiday and National Day of Mourning in Canada to honor the life and mark the passing of Queen Elizabeth II.
On August 31, 2022, Mexico’s Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare issued a regulation changing the Federal Attorney General’s Office for the Defense of Labor (Procuraduría Federal de la Defensa del Trabajo, known as PROFEDET) to focus on mediation, rather than having employers summoned before the agency for mandatory reconciliation with employees, their beneficiaries, and unions.
Significant changes are coming to the employee paid sick leave regime under Part III of the Canada Labour Code (CLC) that will affect employers with one hundred or more employees in federally regulated industries such as banking, aviation, telecommunications, and inter-provincial transportation. Currently, these changes are set to become effective on December 1, 2022.
