Watson Wyatt Worldwide, a leading global consulting firm, has acquired Marcu & Asociados, a human resources and financial services consulting firm in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

HireRight, a provider of software-as-a-service for employee screening, has rolled out HireRight Professional, a background screening solution targeted at mid-sized companies. The new offering includes process automation, online consent forms, and support for electronic signatures, links into compliance tools, and more.

Stradling Global Sourcing has changed its name to Avasant to more accurately reflect its focus on providing global management advisory services.

Findley Davies, Inc. human resources consulting firm, was honored with the Award of Excellence in the category of Employee/Member Communication and an Award of Merit for its work on "U are UH Personal Total Rewards Statement" at the 2008 International Association of Business Communicators Cleveland Vision Awards.

Survey Says
Manpower Inc. released the results of its Borderless Workforce survey of nearly 28,000 employers across 27 countries and territories revealing that 31% of employers worldwide are concerned about the impact on the labor market from talent leaving their country to work abroad. A parallel Relocating for Work survey by Manpower revealed that 37% of individuals would be willing to relocate anywhere in the world for a better career. The survey gathered responses from more than 31,000 people in 27 individual labor markets worldwide.

In Depth
Local employment laws flourish. From The National Law Journal< BR> A growing number of municipalities are taking employment regulations into their own hands, passing laws that have Corporate America's head spinning with a confusing patchwork of compliance issues and liability concerns.

Labor and employment attorneys note that, in recent years, local employment laws have started popping up in cities everywhere, addressing everything from mandatory paid sick leave to higher minimum wages to the unlawful hiring of illegal immigrants.

Local officials argue that they have the right to dictate how employers should behave within their borders, particularly when the federal government drags its feet on key issues such as immigration.

But businesses big and small argue that local governments are going too far in regulating them and are crossing into territory where they don't belong, creating compliance nightmares and opening the door to still more litigation.

"I think we're clearly overregulating," said Ian Meklinsky, a partner in the Princeton, N.J., office of Philadelphia's Fox Rothschild. Meklinsky said that local employment laws are especially burdensome for employers with offices nationwide.

"It's getting more and more difficult and more and more costly to be an employer, especially if you're doing it in more than one state . . . .The myriad of laws and court decisions just make every single aspect of dealing with your employers in more than one state just more problematic."

Attorney Paul Sonn, legal co-director of the National Employment Law Project, a New York-based research and advocacy group for low-wage workers, has a different point of view.

"Local innovation has been a fruitful source of long-overdue protections for low-wage workers," Sonn said.

Washington and San Francisco, for example, are leading a national push for mandatory sick leave; both cities have laws requiring businesses to provide paid sick leave to employees. Milwaukee is currently considering a similar law, as are 10 states.

Moreover, immigration ordinances that punish employers for hiring illegal workers are gaining popularity and stirring debate.

While such measures have passed in towns and counties in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Oklahoma and South Carolina, some have faced legal challenges resulting in conflicting court opinions.

In February, for example, a federal judge upheld Valley Park, Mo.'s ordinance that punished employers who hire illegal workers. But six months before, another federal judge struck down Hazelton, Pa.'s immigration law on constitutional grounds. Lozano v. City of Hazelton, No. 3:06cv1886 (M.D. Pa.); Gray v. Valley Park, No. 4:07-cv-00881 (E.D. Mo.).

Cities are also tackling weight discrimination through local legislation in cities including San Francisco; Santa Cruz, Calif.; Washington; and Madison, Wis.

Adding to employers' confusion is a myriad of local minimum-wage laws that exceed federal requirements.

Currently, there are more than 100 local "living-wage laws" in the country, the latest involving a Los Angeles ordinance that last year boosted the wages of hotel workers. And a Washington measure in January bumped up wages for security guards.

The 'new beast'
"Local ordinances have exploded in numbers in everything from mandatory health coverage to immigration ordinances," said Ron Chapman Jr., shareholder in the Dallas office of Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart whose national clients include FedEx Corp., Hertz Global Holdings Inc. and Southwest Airlines Co. "You could quite easily have a practice that is completely lawful in one location, and in another down the road it's illegal."

Chapman said the proliferation of local employment laws is especially problematic for companies looking to open new offices in states where employment laws vary from city to city.

"Imagine the predicament this puts an employer in when you're thinking of locating elsewhere," Chapman said. "At some point, it's just not worth it."

Chapman said immigration ordinances are especially alarming to employers.

"Immigration is a new beast and it's typically been governed by federal law, and all of a sudden you have states and local ordinances popping up that change the landscape dramatically," Chapman said. He added that recent court rulings involving immigration ordinances have left everyone puzzled.

Chapman pointed to the conflicting decisions on the issue of illegal hiring coming from cases filed in Valley Park, Mo., and Hazelton, Pa. "Now we have a situation where not only are there multiple laws out there, but court decisions interpreting them are going different ways, so it's more confusing," Chapman said.

Margaret Hart Edwards of the San Francisco office of Littler Mendelson said that confusion about local employment laws has kept her office busy.

During the past year, she said, she has been bombarded with calls from clients seeking clarification about San Francisco's paid sick leave law and mandatory health care ordinance, as well as about the wide array of employment laws across the state. "We're always busy, but now we're busier with San Francisco-generated stuff than we ever were before these ordinances," Edwards said. "Most people don't anticipate that they're going to be looking at special employment laws on the municipal level."

Edwards said there are a host of local employment laws that many employers, and even their lawyers, do not know about.

She recently conducted a 50-state survey to determine which states had laws requiring notification of layoffs. To her surprise, she learned that the city of Philadelphia had such a law, which left her wondering: "Who knows what else is out there."

Edwards believes municipalities are using their local power to experiment with legislation they hope will catch on at a higher level. San Francisco's sick-leave ordinance is a perfect example, she said.

Under San Francisco's paid-sick-leave ordinance, which applies to full- and part-time employees, businesses with more than 10 employees must provide at least nine paid sick days.

Washington followed suit, and now there are several states, including California, considering statewide sick-leave legislation.

"Municipalities that want to do something in the way of social change are using their legislative powers as a bully pulpit to bring about that social change," Edwards said.

As they should be, countered employee rights attorney Cliff Palefsky of San Francisco's McGuinn Hillsman & Palefsky, who applauds municipal efforts to improve working conditions for the working class.

"It obviously would be easier to have consistent rules, but if the states and federal government are not going to perform their responsibility and protect people from the overreaching and abuse that is occurring on a daily basis, then it's up to the local authorities to do it," Palefsky said.

Palefsky especially applauded all the "living wage" laws that are continuing to pop up in cities across the country. He also hopes more cities follow San Francisco's suit in adopting paid sick leave and mandatory health care laws.

"How many years have we been talking about universal health care?" Palefsky said. "If the federal government isn't going to act, and the state governments aren't going to act, then thank goodness for the local authorities."

Sonn of the National Employment Law Project noted that civil rights laws and human rights laws first appeared at the municipal level in the 1950s and 1960s before they were scaled up to the federal level. Now it's employment laws that are building their way up. "That's exactly what's happening right now around paid sick days - it's the building toward proposals at the state level to adopt those sort of basic protections," Sonn said.

Meanwhile, the chairman of the Dorchester County, S.C., council, Larry Hargett, defended local regulation of employers, having passed an immigration ordinance himself 18 months ago.

Hargett explained that officials in Dorchester County took action after receiving complaints from local, smaller businesses who said they couldn't compete with employers who were hiring illegal immigrants.

Local residents also complained that they couldn't get jobs. To level the playing field, the county adopted an ordinance that allows the county to revoke the business license of any company that knowingly hires an illegal worker.

Beaufort County, S.C., has passed a similar ordinance.

"We feel very comfortable with our ordinance," said Hargett, adding that an inactive Congress prompted local lawmakers to take matters into their own hands.

"If they won't take care of it, which is really their responsibility in the first place, then we will not walk away from our responsibility."