Compliance Stuff

At a Glance This article provides an overview of the thousands of labor and employment-related bills introduced in the United States in the first quarter of the year and looks at trends that appear to be emerging. Ones To Watch is back with Littler’s fourth annual forecast of the year’s trendiest topics in federal and state labor and employment-related legislation. Three months into the year, with all but a handful of state legislatures currently in session, several trends have emerged for 2026. While we cannot know which of these will ultimately be enacted, the following themes stand out from the crowd. Immigration Just as in 2025, we see a significant amount of proposed legislation regarding immigration and employment at the state level. Many of these bills focus on the federal E-Verify program, which uses federal government records to confirm an employee’s authorization to work in the United States. While the program is voluntary, several states already require public employers and...

  The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo issued a memo to board regional directors doubling down on her position that overbroad noncompete agreements are unlawful and asserting that certain “stay-or-pay” provisions violate employees’ rights under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). We’ve gathered articles on the news from SHRM and other outlets. General Counsel’s Reasoning Under stay-or-pay provisions, an employee must pay their employer if they separate from work, Abruzzo explained. Such provisions “infringe on employees’ Section 7 rights in many of the same ways that noncompete agreements do,” she wrote. Section 7 of the NLRA guarantees employees “the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection,” as well as the right “to ...