The Workplace Report with Ancel Glink

A key component to businesses reopening in Illinois is daily or more frequent health screens for employees. Of course, it is important to maintain a safe and healthy environment. As part of Phase 3 of the Restore Illinois Plan, the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) developed as a “best practice” the following questions to ask employees at least daily: Have you felt feverish? Do you have a cough? Do you have a sore throat? Have you been experiencing difficulty breathing or shortness of breath? Do you have muscle aches? Have you had a new or unusual headache (e.g., not related to caffeine, diet, or hunger, not related to a history of migraines, clusters, or tension, not typical to the individual)? Have you noticed a new loss of taste or loss of smell? Have you been experiencing chills or rigors¹? Do you have any gastrointestinal concerns (e.g., abdominal, pain, vomiting, diarrhea)? Is anyone in your household displaying any symptoms of COVID-19? To ...

Now that many employers are comfortable with employees teleworking, it’s time to plan a return to the workplace. The Governor as well as the CDC, Illinois Department of Public Health, OSHA, and a variety of other public agencies have issued guidelines for health and safety requirements in the workplace for various industries. Employers need to follow those guidelines and in turn, employees need to know the new guidelines for their behavior. After all, whether employees have been teleworking, or on furlough or laid off for these last few months, or even if they have been going to a modified workplace, the workplace is different than it was three months ago. This is the purpose of the Return to the Workplace Policy. A number of new rules now exist in the old workplace, from hygiene and social distancing requirements to notification requirements by employees. You can’t effectively enforce the new rules unless your employees first know what they are. Let’s first address what...

It didn’t take the State legislature too long after reconvening last week to introduce new employment laws, including extending benefits for COVID-19 related illnesses. Below are some of interest: Extension of Paid Disability Leave for Line-of-Duty Public Employees Passed in House Floor Amendment #3 on May 22, 2020, SB 0471 now includes a 60-day temporary extension of the Illinois’ Paid Employee Disability Leave Act’s benefits for eligible employees injured in the line-of-duty who are hindered from physical recovery within the one-year period provided to recover. Eligible employees include full-time law enforcement officers, firefighters, and paramedics employed by the State, any unit of local government (including home rule units with populations less than 1,000,000), any State-supported college or university, or any other public entity granted the power to employ persons for such purposes by law. Employees may seek benefits under the law if a disability occurs, ...

One of the many issues that have arisen for employers during the COVID-19 era pertains to reasonable accommodations under the ADA specifically pertaining to COVID-19 issues. On May 7, 2020, the EEOC issued some additional guidance on this topic. Below is a summary of that guidance. Reasonable accommodations for jobs that can only be performed in the workplace for those who are at greater risk due to preexisting conditions: The EEOC opines that there are low-cost solutions that will not result in undue hardship and that may effectively reduce risk to those at high risk during the pandemic. Such accommodations include but are not limited to designating one-way pathways in the workplace, using plexiglass to separate employees and customers, and the use of tables or other forms of barriers or partitions to separate co-workers and customers where possible. The EEOC also believes that temporary job restructuring, temporary transfers to no-contact positions, and modifying work sche...

As workplace and worker issues evolve over time in the pandemic, many employers are now considering their responsibilities when they begin to reopen. While many expect to reopen slowly, concerns about keeping the workplace safe remain a focus, especially for those that were closed entirely for the last few months. Below are some reopening tips: Consider a slow reopening. Remembering that COVID-19 is not gone and at best we have “flattened the curve,” employees and many members of the public remain concerned about exposure. The simple truth is that the only thing which is certain about reopening our workplaces is that we don’t really know what that will be like. Therefore, consider a reopening that starts slowly, bringing employees back in waves depending on operational needs. Consider continuing telework for some employees. One upside to businesses being closed is that it has significantly advanced the concept of telework. Many employers who wouldn’t even consider it for...

Let’s imagine a time when workplaces reopen. Or let’s just imagine that your workplace is open now and you’re doing your best to protect the health and safety of employees with masks and plenty of hand sanitizer and social distancing when feasible. Nevertheless, you still have employees who are leery of being at work for fear of coronavirus exposure. Many employers ask how accommodating they should be of these fears and when it might be that some employees are being a bit unreasonable. Mostly, employers ask how to handle these situations. Generally, employees who are fearful to return to work fall into two categories, those with well-founded concerns and those with what might be identified as having a more generalized fear of virus exposure. The first might include an employee who is in or lives with someone, in one or more of the high-risk categories relative to contracting or recovering from the virus. The second is the employee who is not at or living with anyone particular...

As we all continue to adjust to what we are calling the “new normal,” one of the most abnormal issues that we are having to address is unemployment compensation. Generally speaking, unemployment benefits are calculated by adding a person’s wages earned during the two quarters when they earned the most, taking forty-seven (47%) of that number and dividing by twenty-six (26) to determine the weekly unemployment benefit. Typically, the maximum weekly amount is $471 with the benefits available for twenty-six (26) weeks. Unemployment benefits are not meant to replace a person’s lost wages in their entirety. The theory of unemployment compensation is that unemployed persons would receive enough money to hold them over until they could find new work. It was never intended that employees be paid so much that finding new work actually costs them money, but that is exactly what is occurring in the “new normal.” Under the federal CARES Act , any individual who qualifies to receive at lea...