Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Updating 20th century laws for the 21st century


At his Connecticut Employment Law Blog, Daniel Schwartz argues that it’s time to start modernizing our workplace laws. As an example, Daniel argues that federal labor laws should be updated to account for technologies such as emails and social media. I highly recommend reading Daniel’s full thoughts published in this week’s Connecticut Law Tribune.

For my own thoughts, I recommend two posts I wrote in 2007 and 2008, which discuss the need to modernize federal wage and hour laws:

We operate our businesses under laws drafted to address the workplace needs of the 1930s. To say that times have changed is an oversimplification of a much deeper problem. Until our legislatures modernize these laws, our businesses will remain saddled with the expensive and time-consuming problem of defending lawsuits over issues such as whether a non-exempt employee who spends a few minutes each night checking emails on his PDA should be compensated for that time. I suggest that we join Daniel’s call for our legislators to start discussing these issues so that we can work towards a meaningful modernization of stagnant laws.


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