From a workplace civility campaign to CEO Johnny C. Taylor’s pledge to work with “whoever wins the White House,” the upcoming November elections loomed large at the Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) annual conference in Chicago.

SHRM had 10 lobbyists representing its interests in government as of March, according to an OpenSecrets analysis of public records. Anticipating that issues like AI in the workplace will become a bigger political issue in the near future, Taylor said on July 24 that “HR will be fully in the mix all the way up to the top decision-making in government.

The professional organization believes “there’s lots of legislation related to the world of work that’s outdated,” Emily Dickens, SHRM’s chief of staff, head of government affairs, and corporate secretary, told HR Brew. As SHRM looks ahead to the next 25 years, she identified three pieces of legislation the organization would like to see updated.

The Federal Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Dickens characterized recent amendments made to the FLSA, a labor law granting full-time workers the right to a minimum wage and overtime pay that first took effect in 1938, as “piecemeal,” and said SHRM would like to “figure out how we can better address the workplace of today as opposed to the workplace that existed when that legislation came into being.”

Keep reading here.—CV

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Most employers now offer separate rooms for nursing employees to pump milk, a survey of members of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found.

Nearly three-quarters of respondents said their organization offered an “onsite lactation/mother’s room,” according to SHRM’s 2024 employee benefits survey, which was fielded from Jan. 18–March 5. That’s up 19 percentage points from last year, when 54% of respondents reported their organizations did so.

This considerable uptick is likely due to the PUMP Act, a federal law that went into effect last year that amends the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and requires employers to give workers a “reasonable break time” whenever they have to express breast milk for the first year when they’re nursing, HR Brew previously reported. Under the law, nursing employees are also entitled to have a private space to pump that’s shielded from view and free from intrusion.

“Just from this one law, you can see the expansion of this,” Calven Engstrom, a SHRM researcher, said at the organization’s annual conference on June 24 in Chicago. The share of employers offering lactation support services such as consulting and education also rose slightly YOY, from 12% to 13%.

Keep reading here.—CV

Minnesota has become the latest state to mandate pay transparency, as Gov. Tim Walz signed an omnibus labor bill on May 17 requiring employers to include salary ranges in job postings.

The law, which takes effect Jan. 1, 2025, applies to businesses employing 30 or more workers at one or more sites in Minnesota. It requires not only that employers advertise a good faith estimate of the annual salary or hourly compensation range for open jobs, but also details on benefits and other compensation.

Kristin Bahner, a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives, who wrote the legislation, suggested companies that are transparent about pay “receive more qualified candidates, more productive workers” in an email newsletter, Axios Twin Cities reported.

The growing pay transparency landscape. Minnesota is now part of a growing list of states that have passed salary transparency laws, including California, New York, Illinois, and Colorado.

Keep reading here.—CV

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