Somewhere in an obscure corner of your workplace, you probably can find some rather ugly wall art in the form of mandatory government posters.
You have have seen these posters in businesses besides your own workplace — tucked away in odd places, often old, splotchy, curling at the edges, invariably ugly.
The posters are meant to inform employees of their rights under certain laws. I can’t imagine who first decided this would be a good idea. Besides me, I only know one person who claims to have read them all. This person was planning to run for Congress.
These postings are mandated under various federal, state and local statutes. A few absurdities can be found among them. For example, in New Mexico, the state minimum wage is higher than the federal. This makes the federal poster irrelevant, but that doesn’t give the employer an exemption from putting up the federal poster. In cities and counties that have a local minimum wage, three (count ‘em, three) different minimum wage postings are required.
A few years ago, there were federal and state mandates increasing the minimum wage annually, so these postings had to change every year. Naturally nobody at the state thought to coordinate the date of change with the federal law so that employers could change both posters on the same day.
You used to be able to get the posters from Labor Department offices. Now they are downloadable from government web sites. You can print them in sections on ordinary size paper, post them on the wall, and be in compliance, with one exception. But millions of small business owners are intimidated by scary advertising and buy posters from commercial services that threaten you with the poster police. (So do some New Mexico state agencies that ought to know better.)
The poster police is the adult equivalent of the bogey man hiding under the bed. It scares the heck out of business owners. But I have never found the actual poster police, and I looked. If a government employee finds you don’t have the poster his agency requires, in general he will give you one.
The real issue is not compliance but liability. If you don’t inform your employees of these rights, and you happen to violate one of the rights (the federal Employee Polygraph Protection Act, for example) and get sued, you are potentially in more trouble than if you had provided the information.
But even if you buy these things, you’re not in compliance. That’s because the New Mexico workers’ compensation law requires you to post a form that the poster companies do not supply and do not tell you about. It’s called a Notice of Accident. By law, a supply of these forms is required to be on the wall near the posters. The form has to be printed in duplicate, so if a worker fills one out, the worker will be able to keep a copy. Supplying these forms does not fit the poster companies’ business model.
The law requiring these forms was enacted before the personal computer became a fixture on most workplace desks.
The Notice of Accident law could easily be updated. But more to the point, maybe it’s time to rethink the whole notion of mandatory posting requirements, so that business owners in these tough times would have one less bureaucratic problem to worry about. It’s laudable for governments to educate employees about their rights. Is it possible there’s a more effective way to do this?
Triple Spaced Again, © New Mexico News Services 2010; posted in 2011