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Laura Fant is a special employment law counsel in the Labor & Employment Law Department and co-administrative leader of the Counseling, Training & Pay Equity Practice Group. Her practice is dedicated to providing clients with practical solutions to common (and uncommon) employment concerns, with a focus on legal compliance, risk management and mitigation strategies, and workplace culture considerations.

Laura regularly counsels clients across numerous industries on a wide variety of employment matters involving recruitment and hiring, employee leave and reasonable accommodation issues, performance management, and termination of employment . She also advises on preparing, implementing and enforcing employment and separation agreements, employee handbooks and company policies, as well as provides training on topics including discrimination and harassment in the workplace. Laura is a frequent contributor to Proskauer’s Law and the Workplace blog and The Proskauer Brief podcast.

As part of the Fiscal Year 2023 New York state Executive Budget legislation, $1.2 billion in funding has been allocated for the payment of bonuses for certain “frontline” healthcare workers.

With the stated goals to “recruit, retain, and reward health care and mental hygiene workers,” the provision – located within Part D of the Health and Mental Hygiene Bill, as amended – requires the state Commissioner of Health, in consultation with the state Commissioner of Labor and the Medicaid inspector general, to develop procedures to facilitate payment of claims to covered employers for the purpose of funding worker bonuses in accordance with the provision’s requirements.  Bonus amounts will be commensurate with the number of hours worked by covered workers during designated vesting periods up to a total of $3,000 per covered worker.