Dive Brief:
- Legal compliance is a major challenge for HR leaders, with compliance issues growing more and more complex over time. Several attorneys with Mayer Brown, a large global law firm, explore a range of legal decisions and fact sheets released by government organizations that will likely have an impact on employee benefit plans.
- With these cases and related guidance, employers and their legal counsel should review policies on topics such as cash-in-lieu of benefits, pregnancy discrimination, health questionnaires and arbitration agreements, according to the article.
- The article explores those four benefits areas in depth. For example, one section looks at how the EEOC's fact sheets regarding equal pay and pregnancy discrimination signal the commission's stated goal to "prioritize investigations or litigation" on a certain topic.
Dive Insight:
As a result, employers should review their policies to ensure that they conform with the best practices described in the EEOC guidance on pregnancy discrimination.
In another EEOC-related issue, based on a lawsuit, an employer’s health questionnaire violated bias laws, as the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri found that a farm products company violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). It required job applicants to fill out a three-page health history that asked applicants to disclose sensitive health data. Some of the questions asked if job applicants had any of 27 health conditions, including sexually transmitted diseases, for example.
Employers should only ask for information relating to an applicant’s ability to perform job-related duties. The article explains that it's smart to proceed with caution when it comes to the ADA or GINA and job applicants. Specifically, the authors write, leave information about disabilities and other related areas out of any questionnaires (or be very careful with wording so as not to cross the legal line).