What's the point of labor posters?

Lately I’ve been obsessed with...

...LABOR POSTERS!

This is NOT an April Fool’s day joke.

No. Wait. Hear me out...

Labor posters are free. You can google “[location] labor posters” and there they are. (Except when the link is broken, which it often is. Then you might have to Google it twice.)

Everyone knows that no one reads them. So what’s the point?

The Workplace Posting Strike Force isn’t going to kick down your door and drag you to jail for not posting a Polygraph Protection Act notice in your break room.

Labor posters serve to show that the company let employees know about their rights. 

They really only come up when there's a complaint. 

Let’s say that part of your employee complaint investigation process is to strap everyone to a lie detector and ask them the hard questions.

That’s illegal. So eventually, an employee with a medical condition that makes his palms sweatier than average files a law suit. As part of the trial, the judge needs to determine whether the company notified its employees about their rights under the Employee Polygraph Protection Act. 

The EPPA includes a rule that you have to notify employees of:

🫸 their right to refuse a test

🫸 their right to stop the test at any time

🫸 their right to not face retaliation for refusing the test

That’s where the labor poster comes in. 

All it is is a pre-packaged disclosure with all of the required wording. But you can also include the information in a handbook, memo, knowledge base, etc. As long as people can find it.

If you can show you disclosed the employees’ rights before dragging them into the interrogation room, that makes the employee’s complaint look more like an isolated incident. 

No poster, and the pattern of behavior starts to look worse. 

So back to my obsession.

If you were going to start a labor poster business, what exactly would you need?

🗺️ You’d need to know where people are. 

So: Their work location zip code

📬 You’d need to send them the correct labor poster.

You could do this by posting the poster in a central location somewhere in the handbook or HRIS and linking to it.

Or you could just email it to them.

🖼️ You’d need to update the labor poster and announce when there's been an update.

But they only change every few years.

Guys. That’s a mailing list. 

That’s all it is. 

A mailing list.

I have more to say on this topic, but for now...

I want you to think about all the companies that pay hundreds of dollars a month for labor posters.

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Think labor posters are cringe? But you're worried if you're making the right disclosures to your team? We can help you craft handbook policies that say all the right things but read like a human wrote them.

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