If you trust your workers’ comp insurance provider for all your labor law posters, you could be making a costly mistake. While many providers give certain notices to their customers as a convenience, this typically only meets a small part of labor law posting regulations.
Partial Compliance Equals Partial Protection
In the majority of instances, workers’ comp providers:
- Only give clients a few federal postings, like the OSHA safety poster
- Do not provide legally required state and local notices
- Do not replace outdated postings when mandatory changes occur
You may be wondering why providers don’t give their customers all the necessary postings. Contrary to what many people think, there is no one-stop-shop for free government posters. Federal, state, county and city agencies often don’t work together, so there’s no central place or website for all the necessary posters businesses are required to post. In fact, about 175 different agencies nationwide are responsible for issuing hundreds of mandatory posters.
What this means is that to manage Posting Compliance for just one business location, a workers’ comp provider would have to contact up to nine different agencies for federal and state posters. Additionally, more than 22,000 U th.S. cities and counties have their own governing agencies and ordinances, with many issuing their own required notices. Beyond these basics, other posting requirements may apply to your business that your workers’ comp provider does not address. For example:
- Spanish postings (even if you have no Spanish-speaking employees)
- Job applicant postings
- Remote worker postings
- Industry-specific postings
Satisfying all the mandatory labor law posting laws is a big job — and the vast majority of workers’ comp insurance providers don’t have the resources to research every posting requirement and contact the appropriate agencies in your jurisdiction — federal, state and local.
Why It Matters
By not displaying all the mandatory labor law postings that inform employees of their legal rights, your company could be at risk for government fines. But fines aren’t the real threat. The real dangers of posting violations surround employee disputes.
If an employer has an outdated poster — or no poster — the courts may decide that the statute of limitations doesn’t apply because employees weren’t notified of their legal rights and responsibilities. In other words, lawsuits that normally wouldn’t be allowed to proceed can be permitted to move forward simply because your poster was out of date or missing. Not posting also can serve as evidence of “bad faith” and directly affect damages in an employee dispute.
100% Compliance Guaranteed
Poster Guard® Compliance Protection is the leading labor law poster service that gets your business up to date with all required federal, state, county and city labor law postings. Our in-house legal team continuously monitors all the government agencies. When a mandatory change occurs, we ship you a replacement poster free of charge. And we guarantee our posters are 100% compliant — so you don’t have to worry that you’re not meeting your legal requirements.
