• Better Pizza, Better Wages. A New York Papa John’s franchise was hit this month with an $800,000 consent judgment for failure to pay wages and overtime to its employees. The franchisee apparently was rounding hours worked down to the nearest whole hour, thereby underpaying its pizza makers and delivery folks. New York law calls that “wage theft.”
• Union numbers down. BNA reports that the share of private sector workers represented by unions fell by 0.1 percentage point in 2014 to 7.4 percent.
• Hiring up. Almost 36 percent of businesses expect to add workers to their payrolls in the first quarter of 2015, according to a National Association for Business Economics Survey. Only 7 percent expect to cut jobs.

Michael Homans is a Labor & Employment attorney and founding partner of HomansPeck LLC. For more employment law updates, including news and links to important information pertaining to legal developments that may affect your business, subscribe to Michael’s blog, or follow him on Twitter @EmployLawUpdate.