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5 Employee Rights You Should Know About

5 Employee Rights You Should Know About

Businesses owners and managers need to pay attention to their employees. Although your work to create a healthy, productive work environment matters, you can hurt yourself if you ignore the legal and regulatory requirements that affect your firm as an employer.

Failure to discover and fulfill your obligations can result in civil and legal penalties that can negatively impact your ability to do business. The following five employee rights will remind you of some of your basic responsibilities as an employer.

 

Privacy

 

Although employers have a right to monitor employees as they do their work, your employees still have a right to privacy regarding their personal possessions. These rights extend to handbags, briefcases, and lockers. They also apply to mail that is personally addressed to employees.

Also, you should be aware that employees may have privacy regarding their telephone calls and voicemail messages. However, practically no protections exist for the way employees use your business’ computers, network and internet connection.

 

Fair compensation

 

Labor laws require that you must pay your employees in a fair and equitable way that at least approximates industry norms. However, you must pay employees within your organization similar wages if they do similar work. If you follow this guideline, you will protect yourself from allegations of gender, age, and race-based discrimination.

 

Hiring practices

 

Federal law prohibits employers from discriminating in the hiring of workers based on their race, religion, sex or nationality. Some laws may also forbid you from discriminating based on sexual preferences. Generally speaking, you should hire based on the knowledge, skills and other capabilities of an applicant.

 

Disabilities

 

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits your firm from discriminating against qualified candidates with certain disabilities. Also, “reasonable accommodation” rules mean that you must take reasonable measures to ensure that disabled team members have equal access to your facility and work areas.

 

Age Discrimination

 

Laws prohibit employers from discriminating against applicants and employees who are more than 40 years old. However, these rules don’t work in reverse, so you can favor older employees over younger ones.

 

You’ve just reviewed five important rights that employees have. Now, it’s up to you to take the next step and learn more about employment law and the federal, state, and local regulations that affect your business.

This blog was originally posted on abogadoalylaw.com