It has been just over two years since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed the first domestic case of COVID-19. Seventy-eight million novel coronavirus cases and nearly a million deaths later, to say that the pandemic upended our lives is an understatement. Employers, of course, were not spared strain and disruption—at times over the past 24 months, it seemed that each day of the pandemic presented a new, thorny employment-related challenge for which there was no clear solution.

As COVID-19 turns two and we work through the next phase of the pandemic, what have we learned? We have identified the five lessons that may reshape the future of labor and employment law long after COVID-19 becomes a routine workplace risk to manage.

1. The Mounting Compliance Challenges Faced by Multistate Employers

The patchwork of state and local labor and employment laws was difficult for multistate employers to manage before the pandemic. COVID complicated those challenges, some would say exponentially. There has long been a void of federal laws in some key areas like paid sick leave and childcare support. That void was exposed during COVID and almost certainly contributed to the proliferation of state and local laws on everything COVID-related, from defining who is an essential worker to workplace safety standards to all sorts of paid leave permutations. Whether it was supplemental COVID sick leave in California, mask mandates in Washington, or paid, public health emergency leave in Colorado, every day in the last two years seemed to bring a new "COVID law."