How Manufacturing Businesses Can Stay Compliant With Labor Laws?

Compliance with labor laws protects your employees, customers, and business by ensuring that you can operate safely and respectfully. If you’re worried that your company may not be compliant, you may ultimately face financial hardships, legal problems, reputational risks and more if you choose to do nothing about it.

Fortunately, there are manufacturing labor compliance solutions that can help you get compliant with labor laws. These automated solutions can help you prevent payroll errors, maintain accurate records, create compliance checklists and more!

To get started right away, here are the basic steps you should take to ensure that your manufacturing business is compliant with federal and state labor laws.

Create a corporate compliance program

Once you have done adequate research and understand the legal and industry regulatory standards you should be following, you can set goals for your business and assemble a team to establish a corporate manufacturing compliance program.

Assess risks within your organization

If you are creating a compliance program from scratch, you’ll first need to understand your organization’s risk. This will require that you complete a risk analysis to identify areas of weakness.

Address vulnerable areas

Next, you’ll want to address those risks to ensure your company can comply with the relevant agencies. In some instances, this may require a simple and easy solution. In others, the solution may be a complete overhaul of processes. Don’t be afraid to make big changes when necessary. If that’s what it takes to remain compliant with labor laws, it’s well worth the effort to get it done.

Provide compliance training to employees

Provide your staff with manufacturing compliance training to ensure that your newly-created processes are maintained. Without this training, all your hard work will be undone and it will be difficult (if not impossible) to maintain ongoing compliance. You can use manufacturing labor compliance solutions to automatically assign compliance training to employees at the right time.

Many of these tasks and processes can be simplified with the right compliance solution. Make sure to shop around for manufacturing labor compliance solutions before you start creating your compliance program. It will save you quite a bit of time and ensure that the process goes smoothly.

Read a similar blog about workers management here at this page.

Shift Differential Pay and Labor Law Compliance

Not surprisingly, holidays, weekends, and late nights are not the most popular working hours for employees. As a result, some employers offer shift differential pay, which provides workers with an incentive to pick up those undesirable hours. In turn, this also helps businesses maintain staffing around the clock when needed.

So how does a shift differential work and what do employers need to do to ensure they are compliant with federal and state labor laws? Let’s explore these questions further.

How does a shift differential work?

Essentially, an employer may offer shift differential pay, which is extra compensation for working undesirable shifts. For example, an employer may pay higher wages to employees that work on Christmas or that agree to work graveyard shifts overnight. The law does not require that employers offer this additional compensation, but it does help companies retain employees.

Although the employee will receive extra compensation for this work, the employer determines the rate at which the worker is paid. However, they may be willing to negotiate with the employee, depending on the company and the circumstances.

Fair Labor Standards Act and shift differentials

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) is a piece of federal legislation that dictates rules for employee’s payment. However, it does not require business owners to provide shift differential pay for less desirable shifts. Employers may still choose to do so, but their premium pay rules and policies must still comply with minimum wage and overtime laws outlined by the FLSA.

Additionally, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. That means they have to offer shift differential pay to all workers. However, federal law does not require that employers offer differential pay to all employees working the same shift. For example, an employer might use differential pay to entice an employee to work a shift that he or she does not typically work.

Calculating shift differential

Calculating shift differential isn’t difficult, but to reduce human error, it is best done with an HR compliance and payroll solution that will automatically double check your work for you. Regardless, manually calculating shift differential can be achieved by completing the following steps:

• Determine the percentage of regular pay that is earned for working an off shift.
• Multiply the percentage by the employee’s hourly wage to figure out differential pay.
• Add the differential pay to the hourly wage to determine the total wages earned each hour during the employee’s shift.

Read a similar article about company LMS system here at this page.