Somewhere in an obscure corner of your workplace, you probably can find some rather ugly wall art in the form of mandatory government posters.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The posters are meant to inform employees of their rights under certain laws.\u00a0 I can\u2019t imagine who first decided this would be a good idea.\u00a0 Besides me, I only know one person who claims to have read them all.\u00a0 This person was planning to run for Congress.<\/p>\n
These postings are mandated under various federal, state and local statutes.\u00a0 A few absurdities can be found among them.\u00a0 For example, in New Mexico, the state minimum wage is higher than the federal.\u00a0 This makes the federal poster irrelevant, but that doesn\u2019t give the employer an exemption from putting up the federal poster.\u00a0\u00a0 In cities and counties that have a local minimum wage, three (count \u2018em, three) different minimum wage postings are required.<\/p>\n
A few years ago, there were federal and state mandates increasing the minimum wage annually, so these postings had to change every year.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
You used to be able to get the posters from Labor Department offices.\u00a0 Now they are downloadable from government web sites.\u00a0 You can print them in sections on ordinary size paper, post them on the wall, and be in compliance, with one exception.\u00a0 But millions of small business owners are intimidated by scary advertising and buy posters from commercial services that threaten you with the poster police.\u00a0 (So do some New Mexico state agencies that ought to know better.)<\/p>\n
The poster police is the adult equivalent of the bogey man hiding under the bed.\u00a0\u00a0 It scares the heck out of business owners.\u00a0 But I have never found the actual poster police, and I looked.\u00a0 If a government employee finds you don\u2019t have the poster his agency requires, in general he will give you one.<\/p>\n
The real issue is not compliance but liability.\u00a0\u00a0 If you don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
But even if you buy these things, you\u2019re not in compliance.\u00a0 That\u2019s 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.\u00a0 It\u2019s called a Notice of Accident.\u00a0 By law, a supply of these forms is required to be on the wall near the posters.\u00a0 The form has to be printed in duplicate, so if a worker fills one out, the worker will be able to keep a copy.\u00a0 Supplying these forms does not fit the poster companies\u2019 business model.<\/p>\n
The law requiring these forms was enacted before the personal computer became a fixture on most workplace desks.<\/p>\n
The Notice of Accident law could easily be updated.\u00a0 But more to the point, maybe it\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s laudable for governments to educate employees about their rights.\u00a0 Is it possible there\u2019s a more effective way to do this?<\/p>\n
Triple Spaced Again, \u00a9 New Mexico News Services 2010; posted in 2011<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading