Amazon Polly

There is no business that doesn’t have employees. And while employees may be under your authority while at the workplace, they are not beneath you, or any other manager or owner. There are certain rights that your employees have that your business is required to uphold. It shouldn’t be difficult walking the line between acceptable employer and employee relationships and unacceptable ones. You need to know what is expected of you as an employer. Here are three legal rights every employee has at your business and what you need to do to uphold these rights.

Protection Against Discrimination

The first legal right that every employee at your business has is protection against discrimination. You, the business, and the employees of the business are not allowed to discriminate against any other employee in the workplace. There is never any leeway with discrimination, you must treat your employees equally. This includes discrimination for reasons of sex, gender, sexuality, race, religion, nationality, age, or any other such reasons. Ensure that you take care to educate your employees and yourself on anti-discrimination tactics, and how to ensure that they are treating everyone fairly, equally, and non-discriminatorily.

A Right to Physical Safety

Another legal right that the employees of your business have is a legal right to physical safety. This one is probably a no-brainer for you: your employees are entitled to a safe working environment and practices that protect their physical safety. Employees have a legal right to know about hazards in their workplace. If you know that your working environment exposes your employees to any sort of chemical that can cause health effects, you are required to disclose that information to your employees. As a business, you need to do your best to always protect the safety of your employees.

Minimum Wage

The final legal right of all your employees at your business is minimum wage pay. You are required to pay your workers the federal or state minimum wage in your area, whichever one is higher. This also includes regulations that your employees are entitled to overtime pay and holiday pay. There is never any reason that you should be paying any employee less than the legislated minimum wage.

Making sure that your employees are legally protected and given their rights as workers is a part of your responsibility as a business owner. If you are not respecting these rights, it will catch up to you. Make sure that you are honoring your employees’ rights in the workplace. If you don’t respect these rights, you’re not just an A**Hole Boss, you are breaking the law.

Read this next: How to Reduce High Stress in the Workplace