Workers' Rights
Federal and state protections for employees covering wages, safety, discrimination, and more.
Covered in this guide:
Federal law sets the floor your employer can't go beneath. The Fair Labor Standards Act sets minimum wage ($7.25/hr) and overtime after 40 hours. OSHA covers workplace safety. Title VII, the ADA, and the ADEA ban discrimination — file with the EEOC within 180 to 300 days. FMLA gives 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave if your employer has 50+ staff and you've worked 1,250 hours. The NLRA protects your right to organize and discuss pay. Many states stack on higher wages and stricter rules.
Key Federal Laws
Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)
29 U.S.C. §§ 201–219
Minimum wage, overtime, child labor
Occupational Safety and Health Act
29 U.S.C. §§ 651–678
Workplace safety, OSHA complaints
Title VII, Civil Rights Act of 1964
42 U.S.C. §§ 2000e et seq.
Employment discrimination
Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA)
29 U.S.C. §§ 2601–2654
Job-protected leave
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
42 U.S.C. §§ 12101–12213
Disability accommodations
National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)
29 U.S.C. §§ 151–169
Right to organize
Overtime Pay
The rule is older than your grandparents and it hasn't changed: work more than 40 hours in a single workweek and your employer owes you at least 1.5 times your regular rate for every hour past 40. Tha...
Minimum Wage
The federal floor is $7.25 an hour. It's been there since July 24, 2009 — the longest stretch the U.S. has gone without a raise since the minimum wage was created in 1938. Inflation has eaten roughly...
Workplace Safety (OSHA)
OSHA exists because Americans were dying on the job at horrifying rates — roughly 14,000 a year in the late 1960s, plus another 2.2 million serious injuries annually. The 1970 OSH Act gave every worke...
Workplace Discrimination
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act made it illegal for employers to treat workers differently based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The ADA added disability in 1990; the ADEA co...
Wrongful Termination
The U.S. is an at-will country, which means an employer can usually let you go for almost any reason — or no reason at all — without notice. Montana is the lone holdout: under its Wrongful Discharge f...
Family and Medical Leave (FMLA)
FMLA was Bill Clinton's first signature law, in February 1993, after the previous Congress had passed it twice and George H.W. Bush had vetoed it twice. The compromise that finally got it through gave...
Whistleblower Protections
If you report illegal activity at work — fraud, safety violations, environmental dumping, securities chicanery — federal law makes it illegal for your employer to fire you, demote you, harass you, or...
Workplace Harassment
Workplace harassment didn't always have a name. Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson (1986) was the Supreme Court case that finally recognized hostile-work-environment sexual harassment as a Title VII viola...
Equal Pay Rights
The Equal Pay Act of 1963 — signed by Kennedy a year before the Civil Rights Act — was the first federal law to take aim at pay discrimination. The premise is simple: men and women doing substantially...
Workers' Compensation
Workers' compensation is the original grand bargain in American employment law. Before it existed, an injured worker had to sue the employer in court and prove negligence — a slow, expensive process t...
Right to Organize and Union Rights
The National Labor Relations Act — the Wagner Act — passed in 1935 in the middle of the Great Depression, when a third of the country was unemployed and labor strikes were tipping into pitched battles...
Unemployment Insurance
Unemployment insurance was built into the original 1935 Social Security Act, after the Great Depression made it brutally clear that involuntary joblessness wasn't a moral failing — it was a structural...
Meal and Rest Break Rights
Here's a surprise to a lot of workers: federal law doesn't actually require your employer to give you any breaks at all. The FLSA only regulates how breaks are paid when employers do offer them. Short...
Retaliation Protections
Retaliation is, by a wide margin, the EEOC's most common charge — over 50% of all charges filed include a retaliation claim. The reason is structural: even when the underlying discrimination case is s...
At-Will Employment and Its Limits
The at-will rule has 19th-century roots — it spread through American common law in the 1870s and 1880s, summarized in Horace Wood's Treatise on the Law of Master and Servant in 1877. The premise: eith...
Non-Compete Agreements
Whether your non-compete can actually stop you from taking the next job depends almost entirely on the state you live in — not on how scary the contract reads. Four states — California, Minnesota, Nor...
Tip and Wage Theft
Wage theft is the most common labor violation in the country — and by far the largest property crime. The Economic Policy Institute estimates American workers lose more than $50 billion a year to it,...