When most people hear the term “labor law violations” they think of those big companies like Google and Activision. But, in all honesty, any place where there are employees and employers, labor law violations can and do happen. In fact people file thousands of these charges every single year and they are for everything from larger corporations to medium sized businesses to family owned mom and pop stores. These charges are called ULP or Unfair Labor Practices. Not only can a ULP be filed against a business or a specific person, such as your boss, but they can also be filed against anyone in a Union that you might be a member of for things like violence, intimidation, coercion and more. If you have ever been involved in an Unfair Labor Practice or you have dealt with any other unlawful situations, you might be wondering who you are supposed to contact for help. Thankfully we have created a small list below for everything from ULP to Fraud, to Child Labor Laws and more.
Fraudulent Practices
Believe it or not, a lot of fraud goes on behind doors. It could be something simple like pocketing a few dollars here and there or it could be something more serious like using State telephone lines for personal calls to avoid long distance charges, improper tax avoidance by nondisclosure or misrepresentation of facts, extorting money or accepting favors from contractors, clients, or vendors. Thankfully if you do suspect something like this going on where you work – either as an equal partner or an employee, there is something that can be done about it. You can actually call the Fraud and Program Abuse Hotline 800-252-3642. This is only for certain states so if you call that number and it tells you it’s for specific states stay on the line to speak to someone about your state and see if there is a program.
Wage and Hour Violations
If you are a US citizen or an immigrant, you are required to be paid a certain amount of money as well as work a certain amount of hours for fulltime or part-time. When an employer decides to cut you out of a lunch but still work 8 hours straight or they haven’t paid for your salary in X amount of weeks/days/months this is a situation where you need to report it. Not only do you need to report it to the Department Of Labor for your specific state, but in order to receive back pay, it might be time to also start looking for a NJ employment lawyer. The Department of Labor for New Jersey can be contacted at https://lwd.dol.state.nj.us/.
FMLA Leave
The FMLA or Family and Medical Leave Act is put into place to keep you the employee safe when it comes to things like an illness, pregnancy, injury (off the job) and more. This is a federal law that allows you to take off for a specific amount of time because of health issues. This law has helped literally thousands of employees. Unfortunately when it comes to the law, specifically laws like the FMLA, not everyone understands it correctly and some employers even violate it thinking they can get away with it. There ARE certain specifics in order for you to claim FMLA, but if you are eligible and you have done everything you were supposed to do and your employer won’t give you FMLA or is making the reinstating process more difficult than it should be – or worse they have fired you or are abusing you because of the leave, there are laws against this. There are two things you can do. First off, you need to contact the Department of Labor to help with this situation. You also need to contact an employment lawyer and put them on retainer to either help you get your job back or fight against unfair firing.
Whistleblowers
This is actually becoming more and more prevalent over the years. A whistleblower as mentioned by Wikipedia is “a person who exposes misconduct, alleged dishonest or illegal activity occurring in an organization. The alleged misconduct may be classified in many ways; for example, a violation of a law, rule, regulation and/or a direct threat to public interest, such as fraud, health and safety violations, and corruption. Whistleblowers may make their allegations internally (for example, to other people within the accused organization) or externally (to regulators, law enforcement agencies, to the media or to groups concerned with the issues).” As one would expect, this can cause a lot of anger by the person, persons or company that was involved in the corruption. These days whistle blowing is probably more common than ever, because there are more and more organizations creating laws which forbid things like retaliation. In fact, OSHA which was formed in the 70s has created over 22 laws to help protect workplace whistleblowers. If you want more information on OSHA or the Whistleblower website, make sure you visit these links: https://www.whistleblowers.gov, https://www.osha.gov/.
