NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection Issues New Notice to be Provided to Current Employees and New Hires

What You Need to Know:

• The New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (“DCWP”) is requiring that all City employers conspicuously post its Know Your Rights at Work poster by July 1, 2024, and also provide a copy to current employees and new hires.
• The poster contains a QR code that links to the DCWP's website, which includes an overview of the various laws enforced by the DCWP including earned safe and sick time, temporary schedule changes and fast food worker rights.
• The new “Know Your Rights at Work” posting and notice requirements are in addition to notice and posting requirements imposed by the DCWP on covered employers under other applicable City laws, such as the Earned Safe and Sick Time Act (“ESSTA”) and Fair Workweek (FWW) Law.

Last month, the DCWP published its Workers' Bill of Rights website, as required by a NYC Council bill approved last year. With it, the DCWP also published a new poster dubbed “Know Your Rights at Work,” that employers must “conspicuously post” in their worksites “in an area accessible and visible to employees.”  The poster can be accessed here.

The poster is a one page document that contains a QR code, which links to the DCWP’s above-mentioned Workers' Bill of Rights website.  The website contains an overview of workers’ rights under various New York City and State, as well as federal, laws ranging from earned safe and sick time to paid family leave to pay transparency. As directed by the City Council, the Workers’ Bill of Rights site includes a statement that: “[i]f you work in NYC, you have rights regardless of your immigration status.” The site also contains the contact information for the respective enforcement agencies like the National Labor Relations Board, the New York and U.S. Departments of Labor, and the NYC Commission on Human Rights.   

In addition to displaying this new poster, employers must, by July 1, 2024: (1) provide a copy of the poster to each current employee; (2) provide a copy to workers hired on or after July 1, 2024, on or before their date of hire; and (3) make the poster available through other means the employer typically uses to communicate with employees (e.g., the company intranet). Employers must ensure that any notice given to employees is not only in English, but also “any language spoken as a primary language by at least five percent of employees employed an employer.”  The current form of the Know Your Rights At Work poster is already in English, Bangla, Spanish, Chinese, French, Haitian Creole, Korean, Urdu, Polish, Arabic, and Russian.

A violation of this requirement can result in a civil penalty of $500.  However, the law states that first time violators will be given notice and a chance to correct the violation before any penalty is imposed.

As noted above, the new “Know Your Rights at Work” posting and notice requirements are in addition to other such requirements imposed by the DCWP on covered employers under other applicable City laws. For instance, the Earned Safe and Sick Time Act requires covered employers to both post and provide individual employee notice of the “Notice of Employee Rights: Safe and Sick Leave” model notice.  For more information on NYC employers’ posting and notice obligations under ESSTA, see our prior Legal Updates here, here and here.[1]

Similarly, the City’s FWW law also imposes notice and posting requirements on covered employers, e.g., certain employers in either the retail or fast food industry. For more information on NYC employers’ notice and posting obligations under ESSTA, see our prior Legal Update here.

We will continue to monitor the DCWP’s Workers' Bill of Rights website and provide additional updates if and when they occur. With the New York City employment law and national paid leave landscape continuing to expand and grow in complexity, we encourage companies to reach out to their Seyfarth contact for solutions and recommendations on addressing compliance with these laws and paid leave requirements more generally.  To stay up to date on paid leave developments, please click here to sign up for Seyfarth’s Paid Leave mailing list.  Companies interested in Seyfarth’s paid sick leave laws survey should reach out to paidleave@seyfarth.com.

 

[1] This is not the only change coming to NYC ESSTA covered employers in 2024. As previously reported, on March 20, 2024 amendments to ESSTA went into effect that for the first time created a private right of action for alleged violations under the Act.