Yesterday’s CED dealt with whether employment laws
that require notice to employees about their wage and hour, safety, and other
protections also require that this information be provided in other languages
if you have non-English-speaking workers.
It turns out that not only
the federal government but also the states have spoken on this question.
example, required notice in alternate languages at the employer’s discretion
for one of its laws. Iowa required that an interpreter be on site if 10 percent of a given workforce
spoke a common second language. (The state even has a list of certified
interpreters.) No federal law requires that.
More than 20,000 companies
keep up with state law/federal law differences with the What to Do About Personnel Problems in [Your State]
program, brought to you by ERI’s parent company, Business & Legal Resources.
Choose the
edition, and/or one for anywhere else you do business. Try it at no cost or
risk! Click
for details.
When state and federal laws
conflict, courts almost always hew toward the version favoring the employee—and
employment laws tend to heavily favor employees. So you can comply with every
federal employment law ever written and still get whacked by a
never even knew existed.
And, unless you’re a research
superstar, you might very well not know about these changes. Unlike the federal
government, which conveniently puts all new laws and regulations into the
Federal Register, states use a variety of sometimes obscure journals to alert
their citizens that the law has changed. These are not widely available, yet
officials still expect you to know and to comply, and they will penalize you if
you don’t. Ignorance of the law, as usual, is no excuse.
Fortunately, tools are
available to keep up with state law changes. One of the most used is the “HR
Red Book®” series from BLR, officially named What
to Do About Personnel Problems in [Your State]. There are separate
editions for virtually every state, including
This program has kept
employers apprised of state law and its differences from the federal for more
than two decades and is used by more than 20,000 companies. Here are some of
the reasons they tell us they like it:
–Presents and
Compares Both Federal and State Law on 200 Employment Topics. (Click the Table of Contents link
below to see the full list.) For each topic, there’s first a plain-English
explanation of what you need to do for federal compliance. Then, right next to the federal, there’s an
explanation of what your state requires. This convenient side-by-side format
makes differences immediately clear and which law you need to follow instantly
understood.
–Topics
Alphabetically Arranged. Pick today’s HR challenge, from “Affirmative Action” and
“Attendance” to “Wage and Hour” or “Workers’ Compensation” (or “Notices
(posting)” in the current context), and it’s easily found. If you can use a
dictionary, you can quickly locate the information you need in What to Do About Personnel Problems in [Your State].
–Updated at No
Extra Cost.
Here’s the feature that saves so much time researching state law changes.
Program subscribers get six updates a year, sent in convenient replacement
pages that plug right in. And each month you get two newsletters: one national,
one for your state. Unlike other services, there
is no extra charge for any of this.
6 updates a year are
included with the
edition of BLR’s What to Do About Personnel
Policies in [Your State]. Try the program at no cost. Click for more information.
–Compensation and
Benefits Reports. For those with comp and benefits responsibility, the program also
supplies BLR’s respected annual comp and benefits survey reports, presenting
what other companies in your state and industry are paying in salary and
benefits for hundreds of jobs. Separate reports for exempt, nonexempt, and
benefits are all included at no additional cost.
–Prewritten HR
Policies and Forms. Great timesavers, these commonly needed policies and forms are ready to
print and use.
–Low-Cost, Free
Trial. The
entire program costs just $1.52 a working day and can be used free for 30 days.
See the notice below for details. The links below will also show you samples of
the various key materials.
Download
national section sample
Download
state section sample
Download
table of contents
Download
newsletter sample
State Law Often
Outweighs the Federal!
It’s true. You can comply completely with FLSA, FMLA, and other federal law but
still get tripped up by state statutes you weren’t aware of. Get the whole
picture with the
edition of BLR’s What to Do About Personnel Problems in [Your State]
program. Try it free! Click
to learn more.