New York State Assembly Bill A8092B, referred to as New York State's Lawful Absence Law, recently went into effect.1 The Law, which amends New York Labor Law §215, prohibits employers from threatening, penalizing, discriminating, or retaliating against employees for any lawful absences under federal, state, or local law, including legally protected absences under New York's paid family leave and paid sick leave laws.2
More specifically, the Lawful Absence Law precludes employers from "assessing any demerit, occurrence, any other point, or deductions from an allotted bank of time, which subjects or could subject an employee to disciplinary action, which may include but not be limited to failure to receive a promotion or loss of pay."3 The prohibition of any "point, or deductions from an allotted bank of time" means that employers can no longer maintain "no fault" attendance policies, which are often used to limit absenteeism where employees accrue points akin to demerits on their record for each absence, regardless of the reason behind it. Once an employee's total points cross a certain threshold, under such "no fault" attendance policies, the employer can undertake disciplinary action or even terminate the employee. Such policies treated legally protected absences, such as jury duty and voting leave, the same as tardiness and absenteeism. With the new law in place, employers are obligated to distinguish the reason behind the absence, and can no longer undertake retaliatory...
"The election poster for a Reform Party candidate running for Seoul's Gwangjin District Council is written entirely in Chinese. Is this China?" says part of a Korean-language Facebook post shared ...