EMPLOYMENT LAW NEWS
City and County Labor Law Posting Requirements: What Employers Need to Know
By GovDocs
October 17, 2024
In this article, we cover the importance of defining the right jurisdiction, how tiresome and complicated it is to track city and county requirements, understanding required postings, and the consequences of noncompliance.
If navigating labor law posting requirements wasn’t challenging enough – with federal, state, employer-specific, and industry-specific laws — the complexity only deepens as city and county requirements continue to grow at an annual rate of 30%.
Many businesses are unaware of the awaited challenges on the horizon to accurately determine jurisdictions for their locations at a city and county level. We fear that a key concern organizations will face is implementing the right advanced technology to determine jurisdictional assignments when labor law posting requirements are at an all-time high level of complexity.
🚩Are you posting the right city and county postings at your locations?
In this article, we cover the importance of defining the right jurisdiction, how tiresome and complicated it is to track city and county requirements, understanding required postings, and the consequences of noncompliance.
What is a Local Jurisdiction?
A local jurisdiction is within a specific geographic area where the governing authority has ruling, such as a city, town, county, or municipality. The governing authority has the power to enact and enforce laws and regulations, which plays a role in the postings GovDocs Employment Law and Compliance team monitors.
In the context of labor law compliance, local jurisdictions often create their own rules regarding employment standards, minimum wage, paid sick leave laws, and more. Many of these regulations are important to HR professionals when determining local jurisdictions, because they will define labor law requirements, including mandatory workplace posters and policies required at their locations.
City: A city government that sets employment laws, such as minimum wage, paid sick leave, or worker safety posters, which may differ from state or federal requirements.
County: A larger governing area that may encompass multiple cities or towns. Counties sometimes establish their own employment laws and poster requirements, separate from the cities within them.
Local jurisdictions have the authority to create additional employment regulations beyond what state or federal governments require, making it critical for HR teams to accurately determine which jurisdiction they fall under for compliance purposes.
As we move into the next section on nuances, we will uncover the challenges of overlapping boundaries, why zip codes don’t define jurisdictions, and city and county naming convention confusion. Sneak peek: Los Angeles is both a city and a county! Confusing, right?!
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The Nuances of Identifying Local Jurisdictions
Overlapping boundaries are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding where a location is positioned within a jurisdiction. Cities span multiple counties, or a company may have many locations in areas where city, county, and state requirements all differ. This can make it difficult to pinpoint which specific local postings apply. Below outlines a few examples of why it is so challenging to assign a jurisdiction to a location, which can lead to inaccurate posters, wrong minimum wage rates, and misleading paid leave laws for employees.
Overlapping Boundaries: Many cities extend into multiple counties, and some businesses may straddle these jurisdictions. This can create confusion over which labor laws apply. For example, a company with a location on the edge of a city might be subject to both city and county regulations, each with distinct labor law poster requirements. Similar to overlapping boundaries, zip codes also do not define jurisdictional boundaries. [Read our additional resources Why Zip Codes Don’t Cut it For Employment Law Compliance >>]
Varied Local Ordinances: City and county regulations often differ, and it’s not always easy to find these nuances. Some local governments implement their own wage, sick leave, or leave related laws that require separate postings. For example, California has 14 counties that have established their own minimum requirements as of October 2024, and 40 cities have their own wage ordinances. If any of those cities are located within those 14 counties, you will want to partner with a provider such as GovDocs Minimum Wage to ensure your locations meet the right requirements.
Limited Resources for Smaller Municipalities: While state and federal labor laws are well-documented, city and county laws can be harder to track down. Smaller municipalities may not have robust online resources or readily available documentation, forcing HR professionals to spend extra time tracking accurate information or risk noncompliance.
Frequent Changes: City and county regulations change without widespread notice. Keeping up with these changes across multiple jurisdictions can be time-consuming and difficult to manage. HR teams must have systems in place to continuously monitor for updates to avoid missing new posting requirements.
Remote & Hybrid Workers: Companies may have employees spread across multiple cities and counties, raising questions about which jurisdiction’s labor laws apply to those workers. Ensuring compliance for remote employees, especially if they live in a jurisdiction different from the company’s office, can further complicate labor law poster requirements.
Key Actions for Staying Compliant with Local Regulations
Now that we have uncovered the obstacles and hurdles of navigating city and county regulations, let’s take a look at proactive solutions to manage locations and employees across multiple jurisdictions to ensure compliance.
Stay Informed on City and County Law: This process can be as manual or automated as you choose based on the path you take. There are options such as setting up Google Alerts, blocking calendar time monthly to visit Government sites, subscribing to newsletters, monitoring blogs, and finally, the most worry-free option is to partner with a technology vendor who streamlines the process for you. When selecting a vendor, ensure they provide federal, state, city, and county posters required for your organization.
Implement Organization-Wide Internal Audit Operations
As a best rule of thumb, it is important to have consistent audit practices throughout your organization on a monthly cadence to ensure all posters are updated and on the wall of every location. This eliminates the risk of noncompliance. You can find the Department of Labor’s list of required posters here.
Use Technology that Grows with You
Large, multi-jurisdictional employers have plenty of employment law issues to manage without worrying about defining city and county labor law posting borderlines.
One way to combat this is through a closer examination of locations. Employers should take a magnifying glass to the jurisdictions where they have locations to ensure accuracy.
But even more precise is partnering with an employment law compliance provider with technology designed to reduce manual research and eliminate the risk of miscalculating a border. GovDocs is announcing the use of LocationCheck, a process of taking an organization or employee’s physical address and assigning longitude and latitude coordinates to determine a jurisdictional assignment.
With GovDocs LocationCheck, you can:
- Skip sifting through layers of stacked maps to navigate the boundaries of states, cities, counties and more to know which jurisdiction your location requirements land in.
- Avoid costly fines for missing postings at required locations due to wrong jurisdictional assignments.
- Implement organization wide audits with confidence to avoid the risk of noncompliance.
Conclusion
Understanding city and county jurisdictional boundaries is crucial for HR professionals to ensure full compliance with labor law poster requirements. Overlooking local regulations can lead to costly fines and legal issues. By staying informed about these boundaries and regularly updating postings, HR teams can protect their organizations while fostering a compliant, informed workplace. Prioritizing this attention to detail ultimately strengthens your company’s compliance efforts and shields it from potential risks.
This Employment Law News blog is intended for market awareness only, it is not to be used for legal advice or counsel.
What is GovDocs?
GovDocs simplifies employment law compliance for large, multi-jurisdiction employers in the U.S. and Canada. The GovDocs software platform integrates three solutions in one convenient place to help you master the employment laws impacting your business. Whether you manage a postings, minimum wage or paid leave program, our products cut through research time, provide proactive insights into the everchanging landscape of employment laws and reduce the risk of noncompliance. The company is headquartered in St. Paul, Minn.
The GovDocs Poster Store simplifies posting compliance for employers with less than 30 locations across all industries, offering a variety of posting products to meet your labor law compliance needs.