Knowing Your Rights Has Never Been Simpler

The opening decade of the twenty-first century has greeted the United States with an economic depression of sorts. Despite the best laid plans of the “mice and men” in Washington, unemployment is at an all-time high throughout the majority of the union’s member-states and territories. Due to the current economic hardships, which American citizens are enduring at this particular point in time, many people have begun to take jobs, which they thought previously were beneath their education level, and monetary worth.  Large numbers of people have finished postgraduate education degrees in a variety of fields, and find themselves working in manufacture, food service, and retail industries.  This is completely unacceptable.  However, the current economic status of the United States and the success or failure of the Obama administration's economic recovery plans is not the subject of this article. This article is intended to teach readers about the importance of worker-rights, which have been guaranteed by both state and federal legislation. 

For example, the United States has enacted legislation to ensure that any employee, who suffers a work-related injury, is entitled to financial compensation from their employer to provide for lost wages and medical expenses relating to the injury as well.  Furthermore, American employees are entitled to a thirty- minute lunch break, as well as another uninterrupted thirty- minute break for every six hours of work, unless the employee is being paid a salary.

However, the fact that the majority of recent college graduates are being forced to work hourly jobs means that many of them need to be made aware of the fact that they are entitled to certain legal rights as hourly workers.  Employers have made every attempt to explain these rights and regulations to new employees through mandated employee orientations, supplementary training, and a multitude of published materials including periodicals, newsletters, and labor law posters, which can be conveniently located in the employee-washrooms as well as break rooms in most commercial establishments throughout the United States. 

These types of posters can be divided into two types of laws, state legislation and federal regulations as well. While state-based posters of this type differ from one state to the next, federal labor law posters and other states’ are printed in both Spanish and English.  States such as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and others also provide Spanish language labor law posters.  Both Florida labor law poster and Colorado labor poster are also printed in both English and Spanish, due to the increasing number of Hispanic immigrants in both of these states. While finding a job is quite difficult in these modern times, working has never been simpler.  Thanks to the development of these types of labor law posters, workers and managers can understand each of their rights and privileges with relative ease.