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In the age of COVID-19, I’m sadly seeing more and more high-level employees coming to me with severance agreements that need to be reviewed. There are so many dimensions and angles to severance agreements that most employees don’t realize exist.

In the past few weeks, I have had the opportunity to review employment contracts of various medical professionals including dentists and an optometrist. The questions that have been asked have been very contract specific and of course what applies to one medical professional may not apply to others, because each contract is unique in nature.

The most likely statutes that apply to you are the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), because they apply to employers with 15 or more employees. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act says that pregnant employees can not be treated differently than non-pregnant employees.

Q: Do I have to use special language in order to request accommodation? A: No. All you’ve got to do is use “plain English” and link the need to a medical condition—for instance: “I need six weeks off to get treatment for a back problem;” or “I’m having trouble getting to work at my scheduled starting time because of medical treatments I’m undergoing.” Of course, this does not necessarily mean that your employer is required to provide the change, but it’s a first step in the process to obtain a change.

A second county employee has filed a claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and plans to file suit against Montgomery County claiming Montgomery County Commissioner James Noack discriminated against her due to her age.

On October 8, the Supreme Court of the United States will hear arguments regarding whether time spent by Amazon employees going through security checkpoints after clocking out is compensable under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

On August 29, 2017, a Parzivand Law Firm client received a landmark decision from the Administrative Review Board of the Department of Labor. The client had worked on Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and was allegedly terminated in retaliation for reporting fraudulent activities of his company.

The EEOC issued the following guidance on December 14, 2016 for employees and applicants with mental health conditions entitled “Depression, PTSD, & Other Mental Health Conditions in the Workplace: Your Legal Rights” Excerpts of the guidance are quoted below.

The ADA was established to ensure that individuals with disabilities are not discriminated against. The ADA does not specifically list out disabilities that are covered; instead the ADA defines disability as, “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities…” The ADA also prohibits discrimination based on perceived disabilities that are thought to impair a person’s ability.

The California Labor Commission recently determined that an Uber driver was an employee rather than an independent contractor, generating national headlines today. In essence, the California decision states that Uber is a taxi service, and that the drivers of a taxi service are employees under California law, because they are integral to the service the taxi service performs.