Employment law is complicated and can have big repercussions for your company if employees fail to adhere to it—either out of ignorance or neglect. A talent contractor for Comcast was just forced to pay $7.5 million to settle a lawsuit over unpaid overtime—a violation of employment law. While you can’t expect everyone at your company to be experts in the law (that’s why you should have an attorney on retainer), your managers should be trained on the basics. Otherwise, you make your company susceptible to lawsuits.
While there are a lot of tutorials and tools you can use to keep employees up to date on their compliance training, there are some employment laws that every manager should have memorized due to frequent misconceptions about what they cover and serious penalties for violating them.
Here are the five crucial laws every manager must know.
To keep reading, click here: The 5 Employment Laws Every Manager Should know
I think with regard to FMLA, the law requires employers to take affirmative steps to notify employees of their FMLA rights. Therefore, if it appears that an employee might be in an FMLA-eligible situation, it’s not enough to recommend that they contact HR. To the contrary, I believe that the manager first becoming aware of the situation should notify HR, so that the packet outlining FMLA rights can be provided to the employee.
grannybunny,
Agreed. We have been working on instilling into our managers that any time an employee brings up a medical issue for themselves or family members that could be a potential serious health condition, the manager:
1. Instructs the employee to see HR
2. Also notifies HR of the situation.
We also require doctors notes after 2 consecutive absences so we can keep track of a potential serious health condition and ensure we are still within compliance of our employer response to the employee for FMLA.
I apologize if I misunderstand, Cheesehead12, but it sounds like you would require me to get a doctor’s note if I had two consecutive sick absences for a migraine? Or for the flu? That – does not seem reasonable.
There is no reason for me to go to the doctor for either of these conditions.
(And if I did go to the doctor, I don’t know what it would cost me. I have a high-deductible plan and I cannot get my doctor’s office to tell me how much a doctor’s visit costs. I could, however, go to urgent care for $100 a visit, so – I guess it would cost me, at the least, $200 for my two doctor’s notes for my two absences?)
What about government jobs? I have heard that it is permissible to forbid talking about salary for government jobs. If this is true is it all levels of government or just federal?
From the NLRB website
“The NLRA applies to most private sector employers, including manufacturers, retailers, private universities and health care facilities. The NLRA does not apply to federal, state, or local governments; employers who employ only agricultural workers; and employers subject to the Railway Labor Act (interstate railroads and airlines).”
Even if the NLRA doesn’t apply to state/local employees, they may be covered by state/local law. Also, if I’m not mistaken, the NLRA DOES apply to employees of federal contractors.
Thanks!
That’s crazy. The salaries of Federal Government employees are public information and publicly-accessible on at least one known website. I expect that most state and local governments also consider their employee salaries to be public information.
Great article on key employment laws, which I am assuming are federal laws to apply nationwide, otherwise, the law would be.by the mandate of the state. Unfortunately, we have too many people trying to utilize the letter of the law versus the exact wording of the law.
Every manager should know basic employment laws