Employers should be particularly diligent about training their supervisors so that they are equipped with the knowledge and skills to handle employee complaints concerning harassment and discrimination.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Acts says that an employer will be held to be vicariously liable for co-worker harassment for which it failed to take prompt and appropriate remedial action where it knew or should have known about the harassment.

Employers are considered to be on notice when an employee reports the harassment to a supervisor or manager who has been authorized, or who the employee believes is authorized, to receive or respond to such complaints or to forward such complaints to management. Typically, in order to be considered a supervisor in this context, the individual must possess a significant degree of control over the hiring, firing, discipline and other employment practices and/or be named in the employer's policy as someone authorized to accept such complaints.

At least one federal court has held that the fact that an employee reported the harassment to a shift leader who was not named as an individual in the reporting structure of the company's harassment policy did not relieve the employer from its obligations to investigate the complaints made to the shift leader and take prompt and appropriate remedial action, if necessary.

-- Tom May,
tmay@dmclaw.com,
Dickie McCamey&Chilcote

The Department of Defense Authorization Conference Report makes three significant changes to the Family and Medical Leave Act.

First, the FMLA has been amended to expand caregiver entitlement to families of recent veterans with serious injury or illness, rather than only to families of active Armed Forces, National Guard or Reserves members. To be eligible, the veteran must be undergoing medical treatment, recuperation or therapy for a serious injury or illness that was incurred by or aggravated while on active duty in the Armed Forces and must have been an active member of the Armed Forces, National Guard or Reserves during the five-year period before he or she began the treatment, recuperation or therapy.

Under the amendments, eligible family members of these veterans can take up to 26 weeks of leave from an employer to care for a covered service member during a single 12-month period.

Second, the amendment now defines a serious health condition to include any injury or illness that existed before the beginning of the member's active duty and was aggravated by service in the line of duty on active duty.

Third, exigency leave -- a 12-week entitlement for eligible family members of covered service members to deal with exigencies related to a call to active duty such as attending military events, arranging for child care or attending counseling sessions -- has been expanded to include exigencies related to the deployment of active members of the Armed Forces to a foreign country. The exigency leave law previously applied to exigencies related to the call to active duty of National Guard or Reserves members only.

-- Christopher Ramsey,
cramsey@morganlewis.com,
Morgan Lewis & Bockius

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