You may recall that San Antonio, Dallas and Austin have enacted ordinances requiring employers to provide employees with paid sick leave. We thought that the Texas legislature was going to enact a law prohibiting such local ordinances. Bad news, the Texas legislative session closed with the Bill still stuck in committee. This means that the paid sick leave ordinances in San Antonio and Dallas are scheduled to take effect on August 1, 2019. Absent a Special Session, there is no other procedural method to revive the Bill, and the Texas Legislature will not have an opportunity to address the sick leave preemption issue until the next session in January 2021.

A court may intervene and enjoin one of more of the ordinances, but it would have to move quickly, with the San Antonio and Dallas ordinances are slated to take effect on August 1, 2019. There is currently an injunction in place preventing the enforcement of the Austin ordinance. The City of Austin has appealed to the Texas Supreme Court, where even if the court decides to review the appeal, a final decision is still months away. Continue reading “Bad News, It Looks Like At Least Two of Texas’ Paid Sick Leave Ordinances Are About to Go Into Effect” →

This past Monday the U.S. Supreme Court held in Fort Bend County v. Davis that the filing of a Charge with the EEOC, or a similar state deferral agency, is not a jurisdictional prescription to the filing of a lawsuit under Title VII.

This does not mean that a plaintiff does not need to file a Charge before filing suit. Rather, it means that if a plaintiff fails to do so, the defendant must object to this failure in a timely manner. In the past, defendants could argue that the failure to file a Charge was a jurisdictional prerequisite to filing suit at any time during the litigation and ask that the Title VII claims be thrown out. Continue reading “Supreme Court Holds EEOC Charge-Filing Requirement is Not Jurisdictional” →