Fresh on the heels of the decision by US District Court judge William Stickman that Governor Tom Wolf’s limits on indoor and outdoor gatherings, business shutdowns and stay-at-home mandates were unconstitutional, the Pennsylvania legislature passed its own measures relaxing some of the restriction the governor announced for bars and restaurants in the Keystone State. Despite…
Read More »While Congress fiddles and diddles with (hopefully) another Coronavirus relief package, some cities and states are using funds received from the earlier federal relief bills to craft grants to help small businesses recover from the economic effects of the pandemic shutdowns. As one case in point, we noted Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is launching…
Read More »The economic havoc the pandemic shutdowns are wreaking across the country is being measured by a host of different metrics. This week a new survey, released by the New York Hospitality Alliance and reporting on 450 respondents from the alliance’s 2500 members, underscores the severity. As reported in the New York Times, 9 out of…
Read More »In the first such decision rendered since the coronavirus pandemic first struck the U.S. back in March, a federal court in Pittsburgh ruled early this week that a statewide shutdown and stay-at-home order issued by the governor of Pennsylvania is unconstitutional. U.S. District Court judge William Stickman IV found that despite being well-intentioned, the order…
Read More »Another law taking effect on October 1 is in the state of Maryland. The state’s Mini-WARN act, which Governor Larry Hogan allowed to become law without his signature back in May of this year. Senate bill 780, which now mandates compliance with the formerly voluntary Maryland Economic Stabilization Act, requires that employers that implement a…
Read More »At long last, New Jersey restaurants can reopen for indoor dining beginning today across the Garden State. At the beginning of the week, Governor Phil Murphy announced on Twitter that restaurants will be allowed to function at 25% of capacity beginning at 6 AM today. The state originally planned to allow 25% capacity indoor dining…
Read More »Krispy Kreme announced this week that the company’s new flagship store in New York’s Times Square is slated to open on September 15. The store was originally scheduled to open back in June of 2019, but that opening was delayed for months until May of this year when the coronavirus pandemic pushed it off further.…
Read More »In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, states and local communities are taking dramatically different approaches to helping small businesses recover from the shutdown and the general economic turmoil that the pandemic has yielded. In that vein, several have announced small business grant and loan programs in the past (New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and…
Read More »Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont last week issued an Executive Order that creates a rebuttable presumption in the Nutmeg State that any employee who contracts the COVID-19 virus likely did so in their workplace. In such an instance, the employer has every right to deny the worker’s claim however under the language of EO 7JJJ, the…
Read More »The state of Virginia, which in 2019 became a democrat trifecta state for the first time, this week became the first state to adopt an emergency workplace standard specific to the coronavirus pandemic. Governor Ralph Northam announced a new Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS), which mandates that workers be provided with personal protective equipment this week.…
Read More »