State and Federal Systems Paper

State and Federal Systems

When describing employment law, there is a broad area that governs how employers interact with the employees, former employees, and applicants for employment. This includes areas of the coexistence, except for negotiating terms and the collective bargaining process, which are covered by labor law. Employment law includes a wide variety of concerns like pension plans, retirement, safety and health regulations, affirmative action, discrimination in the workplace and sexual harassment. Employment lawyers can show business owners how to reduce their risk of employment litigation and how to comply with state and local laws. Employment lawyers can also help protect workers when their rights are being violated. Often an employment lawyer will concentrate on representing either workers or employers (Statelawyers.com, 2007). These labor laws were developed to level the negotiating power of both the employers and labor unions. This ensures that both parties keep from engaging in unfair labor practices and promote an accountability of both parties to participate in good faith collective bargaining. Labor laws were mainly developed to deal with relationships between employers and labor unions. There are labor laws that grant employees the right to unionize and also allow employers and employees to participate in certain activities for the purpose of fulfilling each of their demands.

State v Federal: A Comparison of Employment Law

Employment Law covers a vast arena in the modern workplace. Only by a thorough knowledge of the different areas employment law covers can managers be effective in insulating their company’s exposure to possible devastating lawsuits. In addition to the many laws and regulations set forth by the federal government that affect institutions across the United States, individual states and municipalities have enacted their own sets of provisions to which managers must adhere while operating locally.

Federal Employment Law

The United States Department of Labor is the controlling agency that deals with matters of federal employment law. Posted in plain language on their website are many of the areas covered by employment law statutes which may include recruitment, wages and hours of work, safety and health standards, health benefits and retirement standards, working conditions, and even non-U.S. citizen’s work authorization (United States Department of Labor, n.d.). State laws typically mirror Federal statutes but may include additional protections for the employer or the employee, such as prohibitions based on marital status or sexual orientation (Bennett-Alexander & Hartman, 2004). As stated, there are many different areas of workplace law: here I will examine three of them; recruitment, wages and hours of work, and safety and health standards.

One of the main functions of any company is to hire employees, and this may be the single source of the majority of discrimination actions faced by employers. The regulations that cover recruitment are covered by a number of Federal and State statutes, among them being Title VII of the Civil Rights Act 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act 1967, the Veterans’ Rehabilitation Act 1973, the Immigration Reform and Control Act 1986, the Americans with Disabilities Act