The legal, safety, and regulatory impact on the human resource department really differ by the kind of organization as well as the kind of employees. Rights of both the employee and employer are comprised by a few types of entities that may include the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board. The United States has placed these organizations in order to protect employee and employer from unjust acts on each other’s part. The effect of legal, safety and regulatory requirements on the human resource process and awareness about the statement, “Common sense and compassion in the workplace has been replaced by litigation.”; and a look into the impact of the Department of Labor on human resource processes.
People working in the human resource department must be competent in the laws and regulations that the United States has put in place, because human resource people are supposed to abide by these rules and laws. After a prospective employee signs an employment contract there is a new affiliation that is formed concerning the employee and employer. “Both employees and employers have rights and obligations to each other when they enter into a contract. An employment contract spells out explicitly the terms of the employment relationship for both employee and employer (Gomez-Mejia, Balkin, & Cardy, 2010, p. 441)”. This states that both parties have agreed and have entered into a contract, both have the same rights and responsibilities.
There are more than 180 federal laws that are administered and enforced by the Department of Labor (DOL). The directives and the regulations that implement them protect many activities in the workplace for ten million employers and 125 million employees. Saying that the DOL has something to do with the way a human resource manager relates with employees is an underestimation. The DOL is the ones...