Employment Law Guide Foreword

We at the Department of Labor believe that workers are best protected when employers, employees, and the government work together to protect wages, benefits, pensions, safety, and health.

To this end, we have developed a Department-wide initiative called Compliance Assistance, which envisions a cooperative approach toward all stakeholders, especially small businesses. Compliance Assistance complements our aggressive enforcement of the nation's worker protection laws.

We have developed a number of compliance materials in plain language, including online resources, which help answer questions and make our regulations easier to understand. The Employment Law Guide, which is available in both English and Spanish, is one of these Compliance Assistance tools.

We hope that, through use of this Guide, you will be better equipped to comply with our worker protection rules and regulations. Through this publication, as in all of our Compliance Assistance efforts, our goal is to better protect workers by helping both employers and employees understand our legal standards and meet them.

Elaine L. Chao
Secretary of Labor