One of the January business activities that tends to draw the least enthusiasm is the checking and potential changing of the posters that employers are required to display by federal and state governments.
They aren’t pretty to look at and they can take up a lot of space, especially if they’re required to be in English and Spanish. But they’re part of doing business in our country, and they can even be useful in making employees aware of their rights (even if they’ll probably just look up said rights on Google rather than read the tiny, tiny print on the poster).
It’s especially important for staffing firms to display these posters, as we might be the first point of interaction that an immigrant worker has with U.S. employment law. Plus, as the employer of record for our associates, it’s our duty and responsibility to make sure we meet every federal and state standard for employers.
All companies are required to display the posters in their offices in a place where employees and applicants can see them. Our sister staffing firm places the posters in the area where applicants enter their information and take qualifying tests on our computers.
If you have offsite or work-at-home employees, you’re allowed to send them electronic versions of the posters. You can also have the posters hosted on a company intranet and make sure these workers know where the posters are housed.
So let’s review the posters you’re required to display. First up, the federal posters, which can vary based on what types of workers you provide:
- Fair Labor Standards Act
- Employee Polygraph Protection Act
- Family Medical Leave Act of 1993
- Equal Employment Opportunity — Make sure yours includes information about the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA); if it was produced or printed after November 21, 2009, it should be okay.
- Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act
- Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (note: only applies if your firm is involved with agriculture)
- Service Contract Act and Public Contractors Act (note: only applies if your firm provides more than $10,000 of anything for a government contract)
- Davis-Bacon Construction Contracts Act (note: only applies if your firm is a construction subcontractor)
If you’re not sure which of these apply to you and which don’t, the Department of Labor has a great tool to tell you what you need: the eLaws® FirstStep Poster Advisor. Based on your answers to the questions this tool poses, it can tell you exactly which posters you need.
You can click on the links in the lists to view and print free PDFs of the posters from the federal government. Your individual state(s) will have additional posters you need to display. Click here to find your state’s labor office, which can list and provide the required posters.
The posters provided by the state and federal government are free. However, you’re going to wind up using a lot of wall space (and how much of that is going to be printout margins?). Another option is to order “all-in-one” posters from one of the companies that produce them. These posters cram all the required information into a relatively small space and most of them are laminated, which makes them a good choice for break-room areas.
And hey, some of them aren’t half bad-looking.
What interesting/frustrating experiences have you had with labor law posters? Let us know in the comments!