Epstein Becker Green was featured in the Bloomberg BNA Labor and Employment Blog, in “Punching In: Overtime and the EEOC-NLRB Conflict,” by Chris Opfer and Ben Penn.
Following is an excerpt:
Equal Employment Opportunity Commissioner Chai Feldblum (D) waded into this murky territory last week. I had a back row seat at Epstein Becker & Green’s annual labor and employment briefing.
Feldblum told the group that the EEOC will soon issue training materials on civility and harassment in the workplace. Feldblum also said that she and Commissioner Vicky Lipnic (R) have been trying since before the election to partner with the NLRB to come up with some sort of joint guidance on the issue.
“It’s become clear to us that there had to be some coming together between the EEOC and NLRB,” Feldblum said. “You cannot expect employers to be operating with that type of lack of clarity.”
Feldblum said she “can't at all predict” whether the NLRB would be willing to weigh in via some sort of joint statement. But there’s still a way to thread the needle between the federal laws that the agencies enforce, respectively.
“The reality is that you can read the NLRA in a way, I believe, to still permit a significant amount of leeway to say, this, this and this will not be OK in the workplace,” Feldblum said. “This is not a conflict that is impossible to reconcile or that you somehow need Congress to rewrite a statute, no.”