Compliance Round Up – Workplace Protest Limits, California’s Neural Data Bill, and a Dress Code Reversal

Headshot of Jennifer Kieswetter
Written By
Jennifer Kiesewetter
Published On: September 8, 2026

Jenny Kiesewetter is a practicing ERISA and employee benefits attorney who partners with HR teams on a wide range of workplace compliance matters — from benefit-plan obligations to day-to-day HR policies and regulatory requirements. Her guidance helps employers spot risks early, navigate regulatory change, and make informed decisions that support both employees and the organization.

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The labor board’s Advice Division cleared Microsoft to fire employees who organized a Gaza protest on campus, California sent the first ban on workplace emotion-tracking to the governor’s desk, and the Second Circuit told the Board its dress code test is wrong. Three of the six items below run on the same September 30 clock: a Labor Department rescission takes effect, Florida’s minimum wage reaches $15.00, and Governor Gavin Newsom’s window to act closes.

Federal News

Effective Date: Memorandum dated July 10, 2026; released publicly August 30, 2026.

What’s Changing: The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Division of Advice concluded that Microsoft lawfully discharged employees who organized an on-campus demonstration over its cloud contracts with the Israeli government. In Microsoft Corporation, Case 19-CA-364190, the workers circulated posts through company email and chat channels, then staged a walkout, vigil, and fundraiser. Advice found that the protest’s aims were not linked closely enough to employees’ own terms and conditions of employment to receive Section 7 protection under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Region 19 dismissed the charge on July 21, 2026.

That reading is narrower than Home Depot USA, Inc., 373 NLRB No. 25 (2024), where the Board protected an employee’s Black Lives Matter insignia worn in connection with employee protests about racial discrimination in the workplace. Advice memoranda bind no one, but they show how the General Counsel’s office is likely to weigh similar charges, and the General Counsel has signaled she wants the Board to revisit Home Depot itself.

What This Means for HR:

  • Assess whether the protest seeks to address employees’ working conditions.
  • Enforce email and chat rules consistently.
  • Consult counsel before discipline; political advocacy may be protected when tied to workplace issues.

Effective Date: Published August 31, 2026; effective September 30, 2026.

What’s Changing: A U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) final rule rescinds the 1980-era regulations at 29 CFR Part 42 requiring the Wage and Hour Division, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Employment and Training Administration to coordinate enforcement for migrant and seasonal farmworkers. Those rules created a national farm labor enforcement committee and regional counterparts. The Department calls the structure obsolete, saying it “no longer serves a meaningful operational purpose” and duplicates coordination that now runs through interagency working groups and task forces that did not exist in 1980.

Every duty under the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (MSPA), the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), and the Occupational Safety and Health Act survives untouched; what disappears is an internal process requirement.

What This Means for HR:

  • Treat wage, housing, and safety obligations as unchanged.
  • Do not read this as lighter enforcement, because the Department says its agencies still coordinate through channels that postdate the 1980 rule.
  • Keep H-2A and MSPA recordkeeping current through September 30 and beyond.

Trending State News

Effective Date: Passed August 30, 2026; enrolled September 3, 2026. Under the California Constitution, the bill becomes law on September 30 unless Governor Gavin Newsom vetoes it.

What’s Changing: Assembly Bill 1883 would bar employers from using a workplace surveillance tool that relies on artificial intelligence to recognize, infer, or predict an employee’s emotional state, and from collecting neural data. Neural data means information generated by measuring activity in a worker’s central or peripheral nervous system, excluding inferences drawn from signals such as keystroke pace or heart rate. A workplace surveillance tool, in turn, is any system that collects employee data, communications, or behaviors other than by direct in-person observation.

Tools used to ensure workplace safety fall outside the ban, as do operations tied to certain aircraft development and to products and services for national security, military, space, or defense purposes. Violations carry a penalty of up to $500 each, enforceable by the Labor Commissioner or a public prosecutor. If the measure becomes law, it takes effect January 1, 2027.

What This Means for HR:

  • Inventory every monitoring and productivity tool, and ask each vendor in writing whether it infers emotion.
  • Separate safety-driven from performance-driven monitoring in your documentation.
  • Plan for January 1 now, because the bill becomes law on September 30 whether or not Newsom signs it.

Effective Date: September 30, 2026.

What’s Changing: Florida’s minimum wage rises to $15.00 an hour, with a tipped cash wage of $11.98 after the $3.02 tip credit, under Article X, Section 24 of the Florida Constitution. This is the last step in the schedule Florida voters approved in 2020. The rate then holds for 15 months, until the first inflation adjustment, which the state calculates on September 30, 2027 and which takes effect January 1, 2028. Annual adjustments run on that cycle after that.

Employers must also post the current wage notice under Section 448.109, Florida Statutes. An underpaid employee must first send written notice of the amount owed, and if the employer does not resolve the claim within 15 days, may sue for the unpaid wages, an equal amount in liquidated damages, and attorney’s fees and costs under Section 448.110(6), Florida Statutes.

What This Means for HR:

  • Update Florida payroll tables before the pay period that includes September 30, and apply $15.00 to hours worked on and after that date in any straddling period.
  • Recheck tipped-employee math against the new $11.98 cash wage.
  • Replace the workplace poster at every Florida location.

Around the Courts

Decided: September 2, 2026.

What’s Changing: In Siren Retail Corporation v. National Labor Relations Board, Nos. 24-3168 and 24-3298, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit granted the petition for review brought by Siren Retail Corporation, the Starbucks entity that operates the Manhattan Reserve Roastery, and refused to enforce a Board order finding its dress code unlawful after employees wore union-logo shirts during first-contract bargaining.

The panel rejected the Board’s Tesla presumption as applied to this dress code. Republic Aviation Corporation v. National Labor Relations Board, 324 U.S. 793 (1945), requires the Board to balance employee rights against legitimate business interests case by case rather than presume a restriction unlawful. The court left the one-pin limit standing as foreclosed by circuit precedent and sent the issue-pin and logo-shirt policies back to the Board, which must now weigh the intrusion on Section 7 rights against the policy’s neutrality, how consistently it is enforced, and the circumstances around it. The holding binds the Second Circuit; the Board continues to apply Tesla elsewhere.

What This Means for HR:

  • Write down the business reason behind every dress code rule, and keep it with the policy.
  • Apply appearance rules evenly to union and non-union messages alike.
  • Understand that Tesla remains good law outside the Second Circuit; consult counsel on your location.

Decided: August 28, 2026.

What’s Changing: In Gomez-Echeverria v. Purpose Point Harvesting, LLC, No. 25-2080, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed a jury award of $105,000 in compensatory and $450,000 in punitive damages, plus $904,633.70 in fees and costs, to 5 Guatemalan H-2A workers who sued under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, the FLSA, Michigan law, and their employment contracts.

Upholding the punitive award, the court pointed to illegal recruitment fees, confiscated passports, destroyed time and piece-rate records, restricted movement, and repeated deportation threats aimed at keeping workers quiet. It also found the roughly 4-to-1 ratio of punitive to compensatory damages well inside constitutional limits and far below the exposure the same conduct carries under federal criminal trafficking law.

What This Means for HR:

  • Audit every staffing agency and labor contractor for recruitment-fee and document-retention practices.
  • Refuse to hold an employee’s passport or immigration documents, whatever the reason.
  • Preserve time and piece-rate records, because destroyed ones read as consciousness of guilt.

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