“All politics is local,” former U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill is said to have made famous (even though he did not originate it). We are not quite there yet with employment laws, but increasingly state and even local legislatures are adding new wrinkles for employers. So employment law is a lot more local than it used to be, and becoming more so.
You do not have to have bricks and mortar in a state or city for their laws to matter to you. Remote workers could possibly make your company subject to a jurisdiction’s laws. So could the fact that you are competing with a company in another jurisdiction; you might find another state’s laws being applied to your noncompete agreement.
First, some quick historical background. Not all employment law has historically been federal – indeed, Ohio passed a Civil Rights Act addressing race discrimination in 1959, five years before its federal counterpart. But for decades federal law generally led the way – Title VII of the Civil Rights in 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act in 1967, the Americans with Disabilities in 1990, the Civil Rights Act of 1991, and the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1994 are key building blocks. States could have additional requirements, but for the most part employers complying with those federal laws were complying with the law.
First slowly, and in recent years more quickly, that has started to change. Two areas have stood out for some time as those with significant local variations. One is...
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