While not as exciting as the arrival of new phone books once was, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has announced a new employee rights poster. This is meant to replace the “EEO is the Law” poster employers have had hanging in breakrooms for years.
The new Know your Rights poster is meant to reflect the EEOC’s plain speech initiative. It reminds employees that pregnancy, sexual orientation and gender are all subject to EEOC oversight. The new poster even includes a handy QR code linking to instructions on how to file a workplace discrimination charge.
Do you have to throw away that old, giant poster? No, you just have to add this new poster to the mix. But there are more posters.
The U.S. Department of Labor has mandatory posters including wage and hour, safety and the ever-popular annual OSHA Form 300A. And do not forget FMLA Rights, USERRA, the Polygraph Protection Act and E-Verify.
Not to be outdone, the Oklahoma DOL has mandatory posters too. There are posters for the Oklahoma Minimum Wage Act, Oklahoma Workers’ Compensation and Oklahoma Unemployment Benefits.
How do you keep up? Annually review the EEOC, DOL and OK DOL websites. Put the posters in conspicuous places where employees can’t miss them. Now that most state and federal notices are readily available for download, there is no excuse for not posting. Post at any locations where employees work. Here’s where electronic bulletin boards come in handy – posters should be on these boards too.
While you may be running out of space to post employee bake sales and sports schedules, you are probably best off not letting anybody post on your bulletin boards whether electronic or cork. The National Labor Relations Board takes the position that once you let one employee post, you have to let all employees post. Not only is this an administrative headache, if you don’t provide equal access to bulletin boards you are opening your company up to NLRA discrimination and retaliation claims.
At the end of the day, being proactive is much easier than having to explain to a government investigator why your company did not properly inform its employees of their rights.
If you have any questions about what posters to post and where to post them, consult your employment law legal counsel.
* This article first appeared in The Journal Record on October 26, 2022, and is reproduced with permission from the publisher.