Employees aren’t people who should be subjected to horrible behaviors at the hands of their employers or supervisors. Instead, they should be respected for the job they do.
There are laws that protect employees from specific employer behavior. All of these actions are ones that can be detrimental to the employee. They can also create dangerous workplaces because employees wouldn’t feel empowered to speak up if something is amiss in the company.
Specific things your employer can’t do
Knowing what your employer can and can’t do may help you to ensure that you’re being treated lawfully at work. These are actions that are forbidden for bosses to do:
- Having employees work off the clock
- Refusing to pay minimum wage or overtime
- Retaliating against protected activities like whistleblowing
- Papering a personnel file in order to terminate the employee
- Discipling a person for voicing concerns about work on social media
- Failing to address a hostile workplace situation
- Promising a job to an intern who’s unpaid
- Telling you not to discuss your salary with co-workers
- Discriminating against workers based on a protected status
- Requiring a broad non-compete contract
- Misclassifying employees as independent contractors
As you can see, these forbidden actions include a wide variety of actions. All of these work to protect the employees and don’t place any burden on the employer so it should be easy for them to avoid those.
Employees who are dealing with an employer who isn’t following laws should learn about their legal rights. This might give them the basis of making sure their rights are being respected at work.
