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!

Washington workers with disabilities can certainly use all the help they can get. That’s the purpose of a new partnership.

Hopefully, more jobs for Washington workers with disabilities will be the result of a new partnership between the US office of Disability Employment Policy and the Society of Human Resource Managers. This partnership was announced by the US Department of Labor and is an unprecedented move. By joining a major human resource organization with an agency in the Department of Labor, Elaine Chao, US Secretary of Labor, hopes to make the agency more effective.

Washington workers with disabilities will continue to receive the benefits they currently access through the Washington Department of Labor. This new collaboration will give them access to additional opportunities and resources.

This isn’t the first step the federal government has taken to help disabled workers. Prior to 2001, the federal policy that concerned disabled workers was part of the huge US Department of Labor. In 2001, the US office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) was formed. The US Secretary of Labor, Elaine Chao, thought a separate agency would be more effective.

By pairing together, ODEP and SHRM will provide services to aid disabled workers. Some of the services they will focus on are research and fostering communication between agencies. They also hope to work across agencies by providing guidance.

The collaboration between ODEP and SHRM should help with recruiting and hiring by providing education, research, and access.

SHRM certainly has the background to help disabled workers. Started in 1948, SHRM is now an organization with over 200,000 members. The organization has 550 chapters in over 100 countries around the world. SHRM’s mission always has been to help meet the needs of professionals working in the human resource field. SHRM tries to supply its members with essential resources.

Washington D.C. folks may complain that they don’t have state status. Their license plates may say “Taxation without representation.” (And if you were wondering, that’s not a good thing. A few generations ago, Americans started a revolution for just that same complaint.) But Washington D.C. employers still have the honor of following many of the same labor laws that employers in the 50 state have to follow.

One such labor law in Washington D.C. is the new hire reporting labor law, which requires all employers in the District of Columbia to report their new hires and re-hires to the government of the District of Columbia. The official law is the District of Columbia Official Code number 46-22-06.

As with in the 50 states, the Washington D.C. law gives employers a certain amount of time to report their new hires. In the case of the District of Columbia, it is actually 20 days from the first day of work of the new employee.

One of the neat unique things about the Washington D.C. law on new hire reporting is the set of exceptions to the rules. Because Washington is the seat of power of the government, and many employees and new hires in the area are government workers and or government workers under cover, the new hire law in the District of Columbia does not include federal or District employees who are performing intelligence or counterintelligence. In other words, if you have recently hired a spy, you do not have to report them as a new hire if they are determined to be doing work that cannot be revealed without risking the safety of that employee or ruin their secret mission.

I would assume, too, for these top secret employees that their employment application, resume, background check form, and employment offer and acknowledgment form would be top secret too!

In Washington state, employers have up to 20 days after their new employee starts to report them to the state officials. Without you the employers of the state doing this, it wouldn’t be possible according to Washington state officials for them to save taxpayers and business owners money.

That’s because, by you being on time with your new hire reporting, the Washington Child Support and Employment Security and Labor & Industries Departments in the state can track down their targets—parents who fail to pay child support—within weeks, instead of within months and years, which used to be the case in the old days.

This labor law reduces the tax burden, because then employers and taxpayers will no longer have to pay welfare to these children once their parents resume paying child support. The New Hire Reporting labor laws also ensure that people do not receive unemployment benefits and other welfare services when they shouldn’t, saving even more money for us taxpayers and business owners.

This doesn’t mean that the New Hire Reporting system is not a burden for some employers. Even little employers with few new hires to report could find the system an imposition into their daily routine, and big employers—with new hires every day—could find that their human resource department is grinding down by the new hire reporting process.

This doesn’t have to be so. The new hire reporting process in Washington is flexible, and allows you to report the info in multiple formats, whichever is easiest for you. Plus, all of the requested info should already be in your personnel files. You should be able to find the employee’s name, address, and social security number on their employment application or their resume, even their employment offer and acknowledgment.

In Washington there are many things to be proud of. One of them is our Department of Human Resources. They work very hard to keep all of us in Washington working and providing for our families. They cover all aspects of the employment spectrum from employee to employer. This portion of our government works very hard to keep us employed and to help maintain everything that is work related. They work to keep everything that as a state we strive to achieve as a labor force intact and ready for us. There biggest battle is with unemployment and they are working very hard on that.

In a little less than three years Washington has dropped unemployment by 2.1%. This is a huge accomplishment considering that the unemployment rate has gone from 7.4% to 5.3%. That is not saying that all of the work on this issue is done by any means. This is still high when compared to the national average of 4.8%. However it shows that as a state we can improve in this battle and will continue to do so. We are working on this through the creation of more jobs. In the past three years more than 221,000 new jobs have been created in order to make this a better place to come and work. We also have worked very hard to not only maintain our job retraining program, but to increase it so as to get those people that do become unemployed back into the workforce as soon as possible through either retraining or assisting in placing them with a new employer. The department works hand in hand with employers in order keep Washington working.

This department also helps in creating and enforcing any and all labor laws for our state. They also work to keep the workplaces safe and harassment free for all.