Posting labor laws in areas accessible to employees is required by law. It’s to keep employees informed of their rights and responsibilities in the workplace, but it also helps protect you both in terms of remaining in compliance with labor laws and by ensuring your employees are reasonably aware of various aspects of their jobs.
However, new labor laws are released every year and old ones are rewritten to reflect modern standards.
Do you need to buy labor law posters every year to reflect that?
Let’s take a deeper dive and find out.
What is a Labor Law Poster and Why Do You Need Them Posted?
We’ve touched on this briefly, but it’s best to get it out of the way more formally. If you’re operating a business, you likely already have labor law posters posted in various parts of your establishment.
These are typically found on production floors, employee break rooms, and other places that are accessed by employees only.
A labor law poster lists the various labor laws impacting your employees along with information regarding the proper handling of conflicts with labor laws.
This provides a reasonable amount of certainty that employees understand their rights and responsibilities; protecting your employees from labor law violations and protecting you from claims that employees weren’t properly informed if an issue does occur.
Are Labor Law Posters Legally Required?
Labor law posters are legally required under the Fair Labor Standards Act. There must be one posted in an obvious area where all employees are likely to see it, it must be up-to-date, and it has to be unobscured.
This is a factor that plays into the rest of the topic because while they’re required, some finer details make it less of a pressing issue than you might think.
Are You Required to Update Labor Posters Annually?
While labor posters are required, whether or not you have to update them every year is largely dependent on the content of your current labor law poster and how it corresponds to the current standard.
The truth is, you can’t expect to keep your posters fully updated at all times.
The labor laws change almost constantly. You can order a completely updated set of posters, set them up, and then a week later, it can technically be outdated due to several minor changes to a random assortment of laws.
These changes take place throughout the entire year with little warning or downtime.
How to Know if You Need Updated Posters
There are two main ways to tell if you need to buy new labor law posters.
The first is to audit your existing posters.
Look at the labor law poster you have in your establishment currently, and then get a copy of the latest poster.
If you cross-reference them, you can tell if any substantial changes warrant an update, or if the changes are simply rewordings or minor things that don’t affect your workplace.
If there are substantial changes compared to the previous year’s poster, it’s a good idea to update your poster to ensure you’re in compliance with labor law posting requirements.
Minimum wage increases, workers’ rights laws, contact information and processes for governing agencies, and other major changes are crucial information that needs to be up to date as much as possible.
The key factor that has to be considered is whether or not the changes made are listed as mandatory. Most smaller changes that don’t have massive ramifications for workers and businesses aren’t listed as mandatory, and they’re not required to be on your signage.
The other way to ensure you are compliant is to simply offload the task to a professional who’s trained to understand labor law posting requirements fully.
Not only does this prevent you from having to spend your time and energy going over laws, but it also ensures that you’re getting the updated posters you need when you need them without wasting money on new posters without reason.
This is typically done by a labor law poster vendor. The type of company that meticulously researches labor laws and develops up-to-date posters for establishments.
Since they work closely with labor laws already, they’re more informed when serious changes are made, and they’re more experienced with the intricacies of posting requirements.
This is a lot like knowing how to do your taxes but you still hire a professional service because they do it every day and know every small detail of the process.
What are the Consequences for Not Updating Your Labor Law Posters?
While it’s not technically required for you to update your posters annually, there’s still a good argument for doing so.
Since it’s a legal mandate, there are consequences to not having a compliant labor law poster properly posted in your establishment.
Primarily, you can face legal penalties and fines that cost thousands of dollars. Repeated offenses can get more expensive and have harsher consequences, too.
However, an even more serious threat comes in the form of lawsuits.
As we said earlier, labor law signage ensures that employees are properly informed about their rights. If there’s a labor dispute, and that signage isn’t posted or up to date with valid
information, that can be used against you in a lawsuit.
While it might seem like an expense and time-consuming task to update your posters every year, it’s a lot less stressful than dealing with lawsuits.
The Best Way to Stay Compliant and Get New Labor Law Posters
If you need to buy labor law posters every year, it’s best to partner with a reliable supplier like Labor Law OSHA Posters.
We do our due diligence to ensure our posters are fully up to date, and we understand any mandatory labor law updates that you might be missing on your previous year’s posters to ensure you’re always in compliance with national and state-level labor laws.
Each of our posters is high-quality and laminated to ensure they stay in suitable condition until they’re replaced, too.
Contact us today to place your order and get help with your signage questions.