Q&A
Employer notification practices and concerns with Intro 1081
0:19:40
ยท
176 sec
Commissioner Mayuga explains DCWP's approach to notifying employers about complaints and concerns with mandating a specific timeframe for employer notification.
- DCWP takes an education-first approach with businesses, offering various resources to help them understand the laws
- The agency prefers to conduct a comprehensive review before notifying employers to avoid confusion and piecemeal communication
- Concerns with mandating a specific timeframe for employer notification include:
- Potential withdrawal of complaints by workers
- Cases where initial review shows no violation
- Risk of inadvertently revealing complainant identities
- DCWP aims to balance worker protection with fair treatment of businesses in their notification practices
Julie Menin
0:19:40
Yeah.
0:19:40
Thank you so much.
0:19:42
Exciting.
0:19:42
Okay.
0:19:44
And okay.
0:19:45
Few more questions and I'll turn it over to my colleague.
0:19:47
So you mentioned about how you're notifying the worker.
0:19:50
Now what about the employer?
0:19:51
Because I had heard some instances where for whatever reason the employer was not notified then they would they were not in a timely manner then getting back to the agency and that would then delay the complaint being resolved.
0:20:05
So that was really the issue that I'm trying to get to.
Vilda Vera Mayuga
0:20:09
Yeah.
0:20:09
No.
0:20:09
Thank you so much for that for that question.
0:20:11
And we care about the workers.
0:20:13
We also care about the businesses.
0:20:15
I mean, we we do take an education first approach and we try to offer many educational opportunities for businesses to know the law.
0:20:23
Our Office of Labor Policy and Standards has webinars, has one on ones.
0:20:27
We have some YouTube videos available for them to to look at and we welcome presentations to the industries that are impacted by our various laws so that everybody this is we don't like to play gotcha.
0:20:39
And our concerns with any timeline, any time frame that we're required to notify an employer of a complaint, there's a number of factors.
0:20:49
Number 1, we don't wanna do it piecemeal.
0:20:52
We don't wanna confuse businesses and every time we get a complaint, let them know we'd rather take the time to comprehensively look at the issue that is presented by 1 or multiple complaints, so that we can present one document to the business and say, there are these allegations and here are the documents that will help us figure out, is there a violation or not?
0:21:12
And if there is one, what is the magnitude of that?
0:21:15
So we think it's more beneficial also for the business to know that.
0:21:19
We also have sometimes complaints where the complainant may withdraw a complaint after they've followed with us.
0:21:25
So we don't wanna start a process if there's not really gonna be an investigation.
0:21:30
We may also receive a complaint, and it does happen, where there is actually not a violation of the law once we look into it without having to contact the employer.
0:21:39
So we don't want to, make any business worry if there's actually not a violation of the law just based on the information that we have from the complainant of speaking with the complainant.
0:21:50
And then the last piece is one that really worries us, right, which is we don't wanna have anything counter to what's already in the law about not disclosing the identity of a complainant, right.
0:22:03
We take that really too hard and it's really helpful for us to not have to disclose the identity of a complainant.
0:22:09
And even if you were to remove a name, an address, certain identifying information, it generally is pretty easy for a business to figure out who filed a complaint and we do it like that, versus just looking at the totality of the issues and presenting a comprehensive letter to a business and saying, we received complaints alleging these things.
0:22:30
Please provide these documents.
0:22:31
So those are the concerns we have with putting a time frame into, the bill.