Employment Law in Iowa: what needs order before action, timesheet variance, and schedule change records

Iowa's employment law landscape is defined by two seemingly contradictory realities: the state's tradition of strong agricultural labor organizing (the Iowa Farm Bureau, founded in 1918, and the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 431, which represents Tyson and other meatpacking workers in Waterloo) coexisting with a legislature that since the 1940s has positioned Iowa as a right-to-work state under Iowa Code § 20.6 and § 731.1 et seq., and which in 2017 enacted one of the most significant rollbacks of public employee collective bargaining rights in Iowa's history (Senate File 213, which gutted the Iowa Public Employment Relations Act's bargaining provisions for most state and local government employees). The 2017 PERA reforms — which limited public employee collective bargaining to base wages only (removing health insurance, overtime, evaluation procedures, and most other "mandatory subjects of bargaining") for employees in bargaining units covered by Chapter 20 — generated substantial litigation in the Iowa courts and dramatically reshaped the relationship between the State of Iowa and its approximately 180,000 public employees. The Iowa Supreme Court upheld the 2017 PERA changes in AFSCME Iowa Council 61 v. State, 928 N.W.2d 21 (Iowa 2019), finding that collective bargaining rights for public employees are statutory (created by the legislature) rather than constitutional (protected by the Iowa Constitution), and that the legislature therefore had authority to limit them.

For private sector workers — the majority of Iowa's workforce — the Iowa Civil Rights Act (Iowa Code §§ 216.1 et seq.), administered by the Iowa Civil Rights Commission (ICRC), provides the primary anti-discrimination framework. Iowa's Civil Rights Act is notably more expansive than federal law in one critical respect: it covers employers with four or more employees (compared to Title VII's 15-employee threshold and the ADEA's 20-employee threshold), meaning that small Iowa employers who would be exempt from federal civil rights law are subject to state civil rights obligations. Iowa's protected categories under ICRC include race, color, creed, sex, national origin, religion, disability, age, sexual orientation, and gender identity — Iowa was among the earlier states to include sexual orientation and gender identity in state civil rights law, preceding the Supreme Court's Bostock v. Clayton County, 140 S. Ct. 1731 (2020) decision. The ICRC complaint process provides an administrative prerequisite to state court civil rights litigation: a complainant must file with the ICRC within 300 days of the discriminatory act (matching EEOC's 300-day deadline for dually-filed charges), and the ICRC investigates, mediates, and may issue a right-to-sue letter allowing the complainant to proceed in Iowa district court.