Can My Employer Require Me to Come to Work During the COVID-19 Pandemic?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, workers across Minnesota are asking one simple question:
Question: Can my employer require me to come to work during the pandemic?
The short answer: You may be able to refuse to work if you reasonably believe your working conditions present an imminent danger of death or serious physical harm to yourself, and if you have brought the unsafe working conditions to your employer’s attention, but the employer has failed to correct it.
As the world faces the unprecedented COVID-19 outbreak, it is important to know the laws that protect employees impacted by the virus.
“There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.” — Benjamin Franklin
A Partner at Halunen Law, and Chair of the False Claims Act/Whistleblower practice group, 
Did you know that Minnesota law protects employees who are quarantined or in isolation due to COVID-19?
With the 2020 elections fast-approaching, focus has again shifted to issues surrounding the availability of health care and medical leave. Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly given the current political climate, we’re hearing a lot of talk, but not seeing a lot of action, which is particularly tragic given the fact that less than 15% of workers nationwide currently have access to paid family or medical leave.
As head of Halunen Law’s Employment and Appellate Practice Groups, 
The worldwide spread of Covid-19 coronavirus presents an opportunity to rethink the way respiratory viruses are monitored in order to better understand how they spread, epidemiologist and Cochrane researcher Dr. Tom Jefferson writes in a 
The public-private partnership envisioned by the qui tam provisions of the False Claims Act (FCA) is one of its most successful and powerful aspects, yielding billions of dollars in recoveries. The FCA permits the Government, the whistleblower, and their attorneys to cooperate—and they often do—when investigating and litigating FCA claims. But are there limits to that cooperation? Can government officials ask a whistleblower to secretly record conversations between the whistleblower and individuals who are under investigation but are represented by an attorney? The answer, according to one federal court, is “yes.”
Older workers are one significant step closer to enjoying the same federal protections as other protected classes after the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act (“POWADA”) on January 15, 2020. The Bill, if enacted, would amend the standard for employees alleging discrimination under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
One of the first and most frequent arguments defendants make in fighting qui tam allegations under the False Claims Act (FCA) is that the case brought by the whistleblower, or “relator,” is not viable because it is based on publicly available information, the relator is not an “original source” of that information, or both. On February 19, 2020, the First Circuit Court of Appeals issued an important decision clarifying that to qualify as an original source, a relator need not have participated in the fraud or observed it in operation. Instead, a relator may qualify as an original source if the relator sees or receives information that is suggestive of fraud, hears suspicious conversations, and discovers additional evidence of fraud through personal investigation. United States ex rel. Banigan v. PharMerica, Inc., No. 18-1487, 2020 WL 813258, at *8-9 (1st Cir. Feb. 19, 2020).
We often write about the more common protections for employees in Minnesota, such as protections against discrimination, sexual harassment, retaliation for reporting law violations (i.e. whistle blowers), and protections for employees who take medical leave. But, did you know that Minnesota also provides lesser-known protections to employees? For example, Minnesota law allows employees to take up to 16 hours of time off work to attend their child’s school conferences and activities each year and for each child.