Articles Discussing The Workplace In The Hospitality Industry.

To assist restaurant owners and professionals in assessing emerging employment risks, we are pleased to provide the first issue of our newsletter. The Restaurant Industry Workplace Law Update highlights topical issues in claims, defenses, and liability risk management developments.

The U.S. Department of Labor (“DOL”) has issued three sets of proposed regulations that significantly impact the Hospitality industry. As recently discussed in several Littler articles, after two years of regulatory inactivity, the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division published three Notices of Proposed Rulemaking (“NPRM”) regarding overtime exemptions, the regular rate, and joint employment under the Federal Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”).

As part of our practice, we like to keep an eye on significant legislative, regulatory, and judicial developments affecting our clients in the hospitality industry. Based on our monitoring of these legal trends, we are shining a light on five key issues that are, or should be, top of mind right now for hospitality employers.

Bruce Sarchet and Corinn Jackson, both with Littler’s Workplace Policy Institute, discuss a noticeable trend developing in the hotel industry. They review the burgeoning popularity of laws requiring hotel employers to provide certain workers – primarily guestroom cleaning staff – with panic buttons to be used in emergencies, including instances of sexual harassment by guests. Bruce and Corinn survey panic button ordinances enacted in Seattle, Sacramento, and Chicago. They also consider a bill pending in California that would impose similar obligations statewide.

The Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) establishes and enforces workplace safety regulations in several industries, including restaurants. Under the Obama administration, OSHA has undertaken several new enforcement initiatives that have a wide-ranging impact on employers in the restaurant industry.

Everyone remembers their first summer job in high school. It was not only your first taste of what it meant to work for a living, but also your first taste of having some extra spending money for the weekend. One of the most popular industries in which people look for summer jobs is the restaurant industry. In fact, only the construction industry adds more summer jobs each year than the restaurant industry. Therefore, it probably comes as no surprise that the National Restaurant Association projects restaurants to add around 448,000 jobs this summer, a 4.5 % increase over their collective March 2013 employment levels.