By Andrew Schpak & Daniel Walker Barran Liebman Oregon Law Firm, Beginning in early March, strict social distancing measures forced numerous businesses to either curtail operations or temporarily close. Many employers chose to temporarily lay off employees with the expectation that employees would be brought back within a few weeks. […]

Oregon Attorney General, Attorney General Rosenblum joined 32 Attorneys General in a letter urging online giants Amazon, Facebook, Ebay, Walmart, and Craigslist to rigorously monitor price gouging practices by third-party online sellers. On March 16, 2020 at Rosenblum’s request, Governor Kate Brown declared an “abnormal disruption to the Oregon marketplace” […]

US Chamber Press Release, A new poll taken from March 25 – 28, 2020 and released from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and MetLife reveals that one in four small businesses (24%) say they are two months or less from closing permanently amid the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus […]

New Temporary Exemptions From Maximum Working Hour Requirements By Josh Goldberg & Amy Angel Barran Liebman Oregon Law Firm, The Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries (“BOLI”) has issued a new rule that permits certain manufacturers to claim a temporary emergency exemption from maximum working hour requirements. Recognizing the critical […]

By Josh Lehner Oregon Office of Economic Analysis While it is still too soon to know the full extent of the economic fallout, I thought it may be helpful to sketch out how our office is currently thinking about the outlook.  I was on OPB’s Think Out Loud and the […]

Record Initial Claims for Unemployment Benefits Continue in Oregon By Oregon Employment Department, During the week starting March 22, the Oregon Employment Department received 92,700 initial claims for Unemployment Insurance benefits. That represented a 21 percent increase from the previous record during the week starting March 15. By comparison, the […]

By Dr. Eric Fruits Cascade Policy Institute Coronavirus has hit the economy hard. Nearly all the stock market gains from the past two or three years have been wiped out. While it’s painful for investors and retirees, it’s likely to fuel the third major PERS crisis since the dot-com bust. […]

By NFIB, The Department of Labor (DOL) has released its first round of guidance and required posters for new paid leave mandates enacted by Congress in response to the coronavirus crisis. These mandates, which cover the vast majority of small businesses, will take effect on April 1st. All businesses covered […]

By Charlotte Hodde Barran Liebman Oregon Law Firm, Buried deep in the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) FAQs related to federal paid COVID-19 leave and published previously were concrete examples of information verifying the employee need for Emergency Paid Sick Leave (EPSL) and Expanded FMLA (EFMLA) leave. The IRS published these […]

Tim Duy, University of Oregon Economic Indicators 1.) My column at Bloomberg from last week: The Federal Reserve has taken unprecedented steps in recent weeks to cushion the U.S. economy from the effects of the expanding coronavirus pandemic, including slashing its benchmark interest rate back to zero and eliciting the […]