US labor laws require businesses to post various posters in their offices, informing employees of various matters regarding employment law. But over the past several years, we've seen the rise of "remote-first" businesses that do not have an office; all employees simply work from home.
These employees still have the same rights under employment law, of course, and presumably the same right to be informed of those rights. How is this handled, under the law and/or any applicable case law?
The page you linked to says that the notices must be
provided to employees and/or posted in the workplace
When there's no workplace, I think this means you must provide the notice to employees in some other manner, such as email.
In particular, the OSH Act of 1970 contains the following language:
posting of notices or other appropriate means, keep their employees informed of their protections and obligations
Email and snail mail would fall under "other appropriate means".
In December 2020, the U.S. Department of Labor published bulletin #2020-7 on the topic of Electronic posting of notices. It is not marked as withdrawn by the DoL as of 2024, so it remains valid.
Regulations mandating workplace posters were introduced as early as 1939, so the original texts are typically silent on the possibility of remote work. The Wage and Hour Division of the DoL, responsible for enforcing various poster laws, provides the following guidance for remote employers:
If a statute and its regulations require a notice to be continuously posted at a worksite, in most cases, WHD will only consider electronic posting an acceptable substitute for the continuous posting requirement where:
(1) All of the employer’s employees exclusively work remotely,
(2) All employees customarily receive information from the employer via electronic means, and
(3) All employees have readily available access to the electronic posting at all times.
In this circumstance, where there is no physical establishment where employees are employed and employees can access the electronic posting at any time, WHD will consider such electronic posting to meet the regulatory requirements that the notice be posted in a conspicuous place where employees are employed so as to permit them to readily observe a copy.
Where the employer finds it inappropriate to post such a notice, the regulations permit an employer to satisfy this requirement by providing the poster directly to all employees subject to its terms. Therefore, if an employer finds it inappropriate to post a physical notice to employees, an employer may satisfy the Section 14(c) posting requirements in 29 C.F.R. § 525.14 by emailing or direct mailing the poster to workers employed under 14(c) subminimum wage certificates or, where appropriate, the parents and/or guardians of such employees.
Where, as described above,
(1) All of the employer’s employees exclusively work remotely,
(2) All employees customarily receive information from the employer via electronic means, and
(3) All employees have readily available access to the electronic posting at all times,
WHD would consider this worksite posting requirement to be met if an electronic posting of WH Publication 1313, and the applicable wage determination, is as readily accessible to those workers as a hard-copy posting would be.
All 50 states, as well as some counties and cities, have their own mandatory workplace posters as well. One example of how compliance is done can be found on Washington State University's website where a public page for employees combines federal, Washington, and Seattle posters in one place.
Another company went even further and just combined posters from every single state into one giant PDF, which is presumably sufficient to ensure country-wide compliance if this document is easy for their employees to find.
