Employees’ Rights: What You Can – and Can’t – Legally Ask Your Employees

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No business gets very far without dedicated employees, but your employees won’t be dedicated if you don’t respect their rights. The laws surrounding these rights can be complicated, however, especially since there are both federal and state-specific employment laws that you have to abide by.

In this article, we’ll go over what employment law is, what employees’ rights are, and a list of topics you can’t ask your current or future employees about.

Key Takeaways

• Employees are entitled to workplace safety, family and medical leave, wrongful termination protection, and more.

• You can’t ask current or potential employees about their family, health, gender, religion, race, or other topics covered by anti-discriminatory laws.

• There are both federal and state employment laws that companies need to abide by.

What Is Employment Law?

Employment law covers many rights and obligations when it comes to the relationship you have with your employees.

This goes far beyond just the people you’ve got on the books right now — employment law also applies to people applying to positions within your company, even if they haven’t been hired yet or won’t ever be hired. On top of that, former employees also have a number of legal rights that you’ve got to respect as well.

Subjects like workplace safety requirements, wages, and overtime are closely regulated by employment law, as are the limits of employee privacy, what constitutes discrimination and wrongful termination, what protections are provided to whistleblowers — the list goes on and on.

General Protections Afforded to Employees

Here are just a few of the protections generally afforded to employees across the board.

• Workplace safety. You can’t expect your employees to work in dangerous conditions or in ways that would expose them to potential safety hazards like toxic substances unless you provide adequate safety equipment, and there are state and federal laws that enforce that

• Family and medical leave. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) gives employees the right to take a leave of absence from work for an illness, to take care of a family member, or after giving birth to or adopting a child.

• Wrongful discharge/termination protections. There are federal and state laws in place protecting employees from being fired or discharged unjustly.

• Minimum wage and overtime requirements. Employers must pay their workers fairly for the amount of time they work, whether during regular operating hours or overtime shifts.

• Protection against discrimination. While this can vary slightly from state to state, laws preventing discrimination on the basis of religion, race and/or ethnicity, age, and even sexuality or gender expression are also common.

• Whistleblower protections. This refers to employees’ right to be free from retaliation or punishment for filing a claim or complaint against an employer for violating the law.

While there are federal laws in place on these subjects, there are also varying state laws that it’s important to be aware of. When there are discrepancies between these, the law that offers the most protection to employees typically overrides the others.

Employee Rights and Job Application Questions

It may seem counterintuitive at first, but job applicants are also afforded employee rights. Even if you don’t end up hiring them for substantive reasons (like they just aren’t experienced enough for the position), applicants share many of the rights that employees have when it comes to being free from discrimination on the basis of religion, national origin, race, gender, or age.

How does this work in practice? Well, you can’t ask job applicants questions about certain topics, including:

• Family dynamics and structure

• Personal health

• Family members’ health

• Age

• Gender

• Ethnicity/race

• Country of origin

• Sex/sexual orientation/gender identity

• Religion

• Disabilities

• Marital status

• Pregnancy/family planning

You also need to receive written permission before you can run a background check or a credit check on a job applicant.

In addition, check your state laws before conducting interviews, because your state may have additional anti-discrimination laws that aren’t on this list. For example, some states don’t allow employers to ask about candidates’ past salaries, while others do.

A Word on Workplace Privacy

In just about every state, your employees have a right to privacy while they’re at work.

That means you can’t go snooping through private mail addressed exclusively to an employee, you can’t toss any storage lockers if they’re for an employee’s exclusive use, and you have to keep out of any personal possessions stored in a briefcase, handbag, or any other type of storage bag.

That’s not all though. In some jurisdictions, any conversations employees have over the telephone are also afforded privacy protections. This extends to voicemail messages they receive as well.

However, the one place that employees may not have as much privacy when it comes to company email or internet use while at work. These rights are much more limited, and in many states, anything an employee sends from a work computer is fair game for employers to monitor.

Federal Employee Protection Laws

Federal protections for employees are the high-water mark for employee rights, as these nationwide laws apply to employees only if state laws provide even more protection. For example, if your state’s minimum wage is higher than the federal government’s, you have to pay your state’s minimum wage.

So which are the most important federal laws to keep in mind? Here’s a nice sample for you.

• Title VII: If you’ve got 15 or more employees, then you’re prohibited from using a job applicant’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin as a basis for discriminating against hiring them.

• The Americans with Disabilities Act: The ADA makes it clear that if someone with a disability can still perform the essential functions of a job, you can’t discriminate against them because of their disability.

• The Age Discrimination in Employment Act: If your company has 20 employees or more, you’re not allowed to discriminate against workers over the age of 39 by providing preferential treatment to younger workers. Don’t worry: you can still favor older workers over younger ones, though.

• The Fair Labor Standards Act: These regulations control salary and overtime requirements as a federal baseline. It also covers how many breaks your employees must have on any given day, based on how long they work that day.

• The Family and Medical Leave Act: If you have an employee that’s worked for you for at least 1,250 hours over the last 12 months, that employee is entitled to a legal leave of absence for up to 12 weeks for qualified medical or familial responsibility purposes.

  In other words, you can’t fire someone for at least three months if they need to take time off for these reasons.

The Benefits of Respecting Employees’ Rights

The biggest benefit of respecting employees’ rights is that you won’t get into legal trouble.

The benefits go beyond that, though, as employees who are treated right do better work, are more motivated, and are more engaged than workers who are treated badly. In other words, respecting employee’s rights isn’t just the law: it’s also a good business practice.

Author

Caitlin Mazur

Caitlin Mazur is a freelance writer at Zippia where she has written 140+ articles that have reached over 1 mil viewers as of June 2023. Caitlin is passionate about helping Zippia’s readers land the jobs of their dreams by offering content that discusses job-seeking advice based on experience and extensive research.