Employment Law for Foreigners
This post is about employment law. It is directed particularly to people from other countries who are not familiar with U.S. employment practices.
It is based on my answer to a Quora question. Please see What are the most important aspects of American labor law that a foreigner trying to make a terrestrial logistics company in (any state of) the U.S. should take into consideration?
I am providing this answer based on my experience helping dozens of international clients conduct businesses in the U.S.
Labor Compliance Office Joins Hall of Shame
Labor Compliance Office is one of many companies that use fear of the law and subterfuge to extract money from naive owners of small businesses. What is interesting about LCO, however, is that it focuses on compliance with labor laws rather than corporate laws.
One of my clients brought Labor Compliance Office to my attention. (As agent for service of process for several other clients, I had already received copies of LCO’s pink-accented NOTICE.) Fortunately, even though the notice looks like it came from a governmental entity (the disclaimer is not readily apparent), my client was not taken in by the threat of fines up to $17,000.
Labor Compliance Office proposes to help the reader’s business avoid such fines by providing for $275 a poster that includes all notices required by California and federal labor laws. In addition, the business receives:
Limiting Non-business E-mail: Define Precisely and Enforce Consistently
Last month, my post Court Curbs Inspection of Employee Text Messages discussed an employer that was held to have unreasonably searched employee text messages because, despite a policy stating that employer-supplied technology must be used only for the employer’s business activities, that policy was undercut when it was only selectively enforced.
Continuing this theme, in a more recent case, Guard Publishing v. NLRB, the D.C. Circuit held that selective enforcement of a policy limiting employee e-mails constituted a violation of federal labor law.
In my opinion, Guard Publishing actually made two mistakes. First, the e-mail policy prohibited “non-job-related solicitations” (emphasis added) but did not prohibit other other non-job-related communications. So the employer gave itself the ability to limit only a fraction of all possible non-business communications.
