labor lawAdivision of labor law center

HR professionals or owners are faced with my conflicting HR questions or situations everyday and how to solve the issues can vary depending on who you ask.  Many business owners or HR professionals often ponder the same question, “Is there an agency or source where I can go to get guidance or assistance on these HR issues?”.  Well now there is a solution!  www.HumanResourceBlog.com is now available for any HR professional to come and share their thoughts, questions, or issues and to openly discuss the situation or issue at hand.  Where else would you be able to go to find a community or center that has professionals sharing your same common problems and also having suggestions for you to possibly consider.  Like they say, two brains is better than one.  In this particular case, it’s two professionals better than one! 

www.HumanResourceBlog.com has a goal to build a community strictly for HR professionals all across the states to be able to post and receive answers from actual professionals in the same situation or have the knowledge to possibly guide you to answer.  State laws vary from state to state.  If your organization operates in multi-states, this is the place for you.  www.HumanResourceBlog.com does not limit the answer to any particular state or topic.  It does not have boundaries and/or limitations in the state the question is deriving from.  If you are seeking an answer to your HR question, www.HumanResourceblog.com will be the solution!

Answers are posted daily from Real HR experts that are emailed the questions instantly.  There is no automation to the postings of answers.  The website is strictly for owners, HR professionals, supervisors  and managers to post their HR related issues, questions, or concerns.  Post your questions today! The web site is not intended for employees to post employee related questions. 

Come join and lets build an HR Community together.

Hope to see you there!

Returning veterans: If you try to go back to your old job and are turned down, you can appeal. That process now includes federal government employees as well as non-government workers.

The U.S. Department of Labor recently released new regulations to include government workers. While their procedures are somewhat different from private sector workers, the same rights apply.

Employers should bring their USERRA posters up to date to reflect the changes in the regulations, as required by law.

USERRA stands for the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994. It offers job protections for returning veterans and members of the National Guard and the Reserve. Veterans returning to their old jobs after less than 5 years are entitled to be rehired. Reemployment is sometimes guaranteed after 7 or more years.

What if your old employer refuses to rehire you? Whether you’re a government or a private sector employee, you begin your challenge the same way. You file a claim under USERRA through the Veterans Employment and Training Service (VETS), part of the Labor Department. Once it receives your claim, VETS makes a determination based on the facts of your case. Usually, if you fall under the qualifying number of years you will be entitled to be rehired.

Employers usually comply with the VETS finding and rehire veterans. But what if they don’t?

Returning veterans have recourse to an appeals process, and there is no charge to the employee filing the appeal.

If you’re a government employee you turn to the Office of Special Counsel. At that point the Merit Systems Protection Board reviews the claim and makes a finding. That board also has the authority to award damages. If you’re employed by one of the federal intelligence agencies, you take your claim to your agency’s Inspector General.

If you’re a non-government worker, your claim is referred to the Department of Justice. The Justice Department is responsible for bringing your case to a federal District Court. If the court finds that your employer’s actions were willful, then you may receive damages.

You see, the secret to reporting proper employee new hire information in North Carolina, or in this case, North Dakota, has more to do with keeping track of all of your employees’ information than it does knowing the intricacies of the labor law of your particular state.

Sure, it’s important to know that in North Dakota you have 20 days from the time that that employee has their first day of work to report them to the North Dakota Child Support Enforcement Division. And it’s good to know, that you can do these reports to the North Dakota Child Support Enforcement Division via the Internet, or over a secure Web file transfer, or through a payroll service whereby your payroll administrator automatically reports the information to the government for you, or even by you yourself mailing in the W-4 forms or other forms from the employee.

But it is also very very important (should I throw another “very” in there?) to know how to get all of this information on new hires handy. You will need to know your new hires’ names, addresses, and social security numbers, and you will need to report your employer name, address, and federal employer tax ID number. That last stuff is easy—it’s all about you, the employer.

But for the information on your new hires, you will need to keep all of those application and orientation forms handy, such as the employment application itself, the employees’ resume, their drug policy forms, their training checklist, and anything and everything else that they completed and signed when they first started at your organization—every thing that should be safely stored in their employee folder.

In our great state of North Dakota there is an entity that is designed to help both the employee and the employer or you and I both to succeed as well as be employed and that is the Department of Human Resources. This department is responsible for all of our well beings as both employees and employers. They will help us not only to identify what is needed to improve but how we can make our employees happier and safer.

This department has done a lot of work in recent years to help our state some of which you might not even be aware of. For example did you know that our state unemployment rate has gone down from 3.7% to 3.4% in the last three years? This may not seem like a staggering number but one should also consider the fact that the national unemployment rate currently stands at 4.8%. So when you put it into perspective any decrease in our unemployment is a huge victory for our state. Another interesting bit of knowledge is the fact that since January of 2001, 21,200 now jobs have been created in the state to help battle the unemployment rate and in order to bring more people into our state.

However, in North Dakota we do more than just have our department of human resources working to cut down the unemployment rate. This department is also responsible for the enforcing and enacting of all of the state labor laws. These are the laws that pertain to you and I as well as any employees or employers you might have. They are also responsible for taking care and insuring the safety of our minor workers. We cannot forget about safety either when we speak of this department. This department is also who is responsible for making sure that we have a safe place to work as well.