The Virtual Executive Employer^®

 
Employers grappling with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are still confronting many challenges, including how to keep their businesses running while maintaining a safe environment for their workers. With essential businesses operating under differing and ever-expansive state and health department orders, employers must adapt to rapidly shifting circumstances.

This panel of Littler attorneys, who have been at the forefront of guiding companies through the critical issues arising during this pandemic, will identify the most current and pressing issues and discuss practical solutions to help you navigate this immensely difficult workplace environment.

Presenters: Brad Hammock, Alka Ramchandani-Raj

 
In March, Congress enacted three bills in three weeks – the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2020, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) – designed to address the public health emergency caused by the spread of COVID-19. These laws have since been supplemented by various state and local government actions, including executive orders, state and local legislation and informal administrative agency guidance (not to mention press statements by mayors contradicting their own city ordinances). This session will provide information on how these government actions have reshaped the nature of work across the United States in ways both intended and unintended.

This panel of Littler attorneys, who have been at the forefront of guiding companies through the critical issues arising during this pandemic, will identify the most current and pressing issues and discuss practical solutions to help you navigate this immensely difficult workplace environment.

Presenters: Aaron Crews, Michael Lotito, Jim Paretti, Amber Spataro

 
Unfortunately, once the immediate health and safety issues arising from the COVID-19 pandemic appear to be in the rear-view mirror, the road ahead may be just as perilous. In March, employers scrambled to quickly comply with stay-at-home orders, to trim staff through furloughs and RIFs, or to close their businesses entirely. In April, they stayed the course, implementing safety precautions such as requiring temperature checks and face masks and extending furloughs and leaves – often cutting off continued pay and benefits. What actions did employers take (or not take) that may now leave them open to litigation?

This panel will discuss how employers can prepare for the coming wave of legal claims and take steps now that will hopefully minimize their ultimate liability.

Presenters: Julie Dunne, Adam Fiss, Michelle Heverly, Chad Kaldor

 
While employers and their employees, especially those engaged in essential businesses, continue to battle COVID-19 with great resolve, some employers have faced threatened walkouts, sick-outs, strike threats and other disruptions. Both union and nonunion employers are dealing with these challenging and complicated labor law issues. Union employers are concerned about when and how they are required to bargain over business changes in the midst of a crisis. Non-union employers are dealing with new and different kinds of potentially protected concerted activity related to COVID-19, including actions by employees in response to health and safety concerns. Still other employers are concerned about union organizing in the wake of the pandemic.

This session will focus on what both union and nonunion employers can do now to address and manage these issues, maintain positive and lawful labor relations, and prepare for the future.

Presenters: Jon Levine, Mark Schneider, Tanja Thompson

 
At Littler we KNOW how to apply current labor and employment laws to the issues that COVID-19 presents in our workplaces. We also KNOW the pandemic is likely to change the way we work, forever. But, we DON’T KNOW exactly what our workplaces will be like in a post-pandemic world. We can guess – more work from home, less business travel, more robots.

In this session, we will seek to peer into the future of the workplace and address the employment and labor law challenges we will face there, TOGETHER.

Presenters: Kim Miers, Bruce Sarchet, Kate Mrkonich Wilson

 
Employers everywhere are dealing with the severe impact of a once-in-a-generation pathogen on a globalized business environment. Companies that typically deal with differences in culture, language, protective social mandates, and concepts of worker participation have faced questions of how to navigate the multiple challenges brought by a highly transmissible virus with extreme morbidity, spread asymptomatically around the world.

This session will explore the strategic options for continuation in national legal and economic climates that differ in their constraints on sudden organizational retrenchment, changes to staffing levels and compensation, and altered ways of doing business. Governmental relief measures, methods to approach cost control across multiple jurisdictions and how to prepare your company for a future calamity with such a universal impact on the workforce, will be among the topics explored.

Presenters: Peter Susser, Stephan Swinkels

 
Before the COVID-19 pandemic situation, employers were already struggling to comply with myriad employee leave obligations. With the passage of the federal Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) and local “emergency” paid sick leave laws, an additional level of complexity has been added to their necessary compliance efforts.

This session will provide key insights into how employers can manage medical and sick leave obligations now and in the future.

Presenters: Michelle Barrett Falconer, Alexis Knapp, Casey Kurtz, Jeff Nowak

 
Employers are grappling with both the personal and economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies are looking at all options available to them, including reducing their workforces, changing compensation structures, and other creative measures to alleviate the fiscal impact on their business both for the short and long term.

Littler attorneys who have been counseling clients during this unsettling time will provide insight and advice on how to continue to navigate these issues.

Presenters: Claire Deason, Daniel Thieme, Andrew Voss

 
During this global pandemic, many employers have tried to be creative in how they can weather the uncertainty created by shelter-in-place orders and the closures of nonessential businesses.

This session will focus on the options retirement plans, medical plans and other welfare plans can offer to your active, laid off and furloughed workforce. We will also focus on unemployment salary continuation programs that have emerged from recently enacted legislation.

Presenters: Mark Grushkin, Emilie Hammerstein, Melissa Kurtzman, William Weissman

  
As employers await the conditions required for physical offices to reopen, there are many steps that they can take now to prepare. Numerous new federal, state and local employment law requirements have been added during 2020, some of which will outlast the COVID-19 crisis; relief legislation and other efforts carry important obligations; and every business can expect medium to long-term changes in almost every area of the employment relationship, including navigating new physical and virtual workplaces. 

This session will provide insights into what employers can do now to get ready for “business as unusual.”

Presenters: Michael McGuire, Devjani Mishra