The California Department of Insurance (CDI) released a new report in June of 2024, reviewing seven extreme heat events from 2013 to 2022 to estimate economic costs and health impacts.

As extreme heating events increase in frequency, workers and employers need to consider the best ways to protect themselves from injury and death. Heat stroke, heat exhaustion, syncope, kidney failure and rhabdomyolysis are all possible when a worker is exposed to excessive heat and not given sufficient water, breaks and if working outside shade.

In California, worker’s compensation is generally the exclusive remedy for employees who are injured on the job, meaning they usually cannot sue their employers in a civil trial for workplace injuries. 

However, there are exceptions to the rule, which allow for injured workers to take their case to court.

The Department of Justice (DOJ), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) have each released press releases highlighting whistleblower rewards and False Claim Act settlements in August 2024. Read for updates from each agency.

A new report released by Harvard and the University of California San Francisco, titled “Compliance and the Complaint Gap: Labor Standards Violations in the California Service Sector” examined the extent of compliance with labor standards among hourly service sector workers in California. Service industry workers are one of the industries known to have large rates of labor and wage pay violations.

Nearly half of workers surveyed at least one violation of the Fair Labor Standard Act (FLSA), with 2 out of 5 reporting violations where they were required to work off the clock, did not receive overtime pay, did not receive full pay, were paid less than the minimum wage for their work, were not paid all required PTO, or they did not receive all bonuses or tips. 

The FTC announced an investigation into the practice of surveillance pricing, listing concerns about how companies are using personal data to set individualized prices for consumers. The FTC sent 6(b) orders to eight companies to gather information about their data surveillance pricing practices and data collection. 

Surveillance pricing has been making the news as companies move to take old systems, such as paper printed with prices on store shelves, and experiment with new systems such as digital price tags that can be changed multiple times per day.  Online companies are also investigating the ability to charge different customers different prices based on personal information they know about the consumer. 

The IRS Whistleblower Office’s 2023 Annual Report was released on June 24, 2024, highlighting the results over the program over the last federal fiscal year. The report covers from October 1, 2022, to September 30, 2023, and includes an analysis of claims received, processed, and the awards paid to whistleblowers.  

In fiscal year 2023, the IRS paid $88.8 million to whistleblowers on a collection of $338 million from their tips and reports. The percentage of recoveries awarded to whistleblower was 26.3%, a large increase from the 21.9 and 14.7 percent awarded in 2022 and 2021 respectively. 

On January 9th, 2023, Denver passed the Civil Wage Theft Ordinance.  The law has been in effect for over one year, and the city and county of Denver recently released a summary of the results so far. The law makes gives Denver one of the strongest in the U.S., similar in structure to the Private Attorney General Act in California for wage theft. 

One of the largest pieces of crypto news this year was when Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison on March 28th, 2024. Since that date, the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have been busy handling  myriad crypto legal issues.

On April 25th, 2024, the Federal Register published a new final rule from the Employee Benefits Security Administration, within the Department of Labor, regarding when a person is a fiduciary within the scope of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA).  The rule was published by the Department of Labor (DOL) on April 23rd, 2024.  ERISA imposes special duties to those who are “fiduciaries”, people who provide advice on investment in exchange, including those who do so for compensation. The new ERISA rule eliminates some exemptions for those providing advice on a limited or one-time basis.

On May 7th, 2024, the Federal Register published new final rules from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) banning non-compete agreements from being enforced for non-senior executives, and banning the creation of new non-compete agreements.