Things to Think About

There are several items of interest right now. We decided to provide a short paragraph about each so you have some awareness of the latest things to think about!

Remote Workers — We are hearing about a couple of things that are newer requests. One is a request for companies to pay a portion of the employee’s rent since you’re now requiring them to work from home. The other is overtime pay for calls after hours… when the after-hours timing is due to time zone differences because employees aren’t necessarily local anymore. Deciding to change part or all of your office to fully remote means you need to consider the fact that you’ve shifted costs from your company to the employee. Since it’s not supposed to cost the employee anything to work for you, plan to reimburse employees for actual added costs in addition to reimbursements for the inconveniences an employee experiences by having part of their home become their office.

COVID-19 Supplemental Paid Sick Leave — California’s Governor Newson has signed SB 95, which requires up to 80 hours of paid sick leave for employees off work due to COVID reasons. This only applies to companies of 25+ employees but is retroactive to 1/1/2021 and runs through 9/30/2021. The eligibility reasons are basically the same as they were for FFCRA (Families First Coronavirus Response Act) last year. Keep in mind the FFCRA is still available so, if the employee is eligible, use the Federal money first.

Worst Cities for Doing Business — A study listed five cities as the most difficult for business. It’s no surprise that San Diego, San Jose, and Los Angeles were three of the five. The other two were Newark and New York City. No California city made the top ten best cities for business… again, no surprise.

Rounding Timeclock Entries — If you round an employee’s time to the nearest quarter or tenth of an hour, make sure you only round when they clock in at the beginning of the day and when they clock out at the end of the day. The California Supreme Court has recently made it clear that rounding for the meal break will get you in trouble. California is strict about when the meal break begins and how long it lasts so rounding the out/in meal break times will inevitably make it appear that non-exempt (hourly) employees did not get their legally required meal break on time and for the full 30 minutes, per our state laws.

Mandating COVID Vaccinations — While California allows businesses to require employees to get vaccinated, attorneys are recommending you don’t require it. The problem is it’s hard to get 100% of your employees to vaccinate because you must take into account religious and medical exceptions. When you start making decisions about whether those exceptions are real is when you start to slide down that rabbit hole. It’s better to strongly encourage employees to get vaccinated. Think about incentives for those who vaccinate rather than punishments for those who don’t.

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