What You Need To Know About Personnel Files

Employment laws offer employees a wide range of legal protections from improper employment actions, such as wage and overtime violations, discrimination, allowing a culture of harassment, retaliation, maintaining an unsafe workplace, privacy violations, or failure to make accommodations for handicapped employees. If you have been harmed by your employers actions, or failure to act, and the employer has refused to set things right, you need an attorney. Further, you will need your records as a starting point to help you show that you have been harmed.

Not only do personnel records help hold employers accountable, but employers are legally required to allow employees and former employees access to their own records. In fact, employers can be held liable for damages if they fail to allow you access to your records in accordance with the law.

You Are Entitled To See Any Document You Signed

Employers are known to make employees and potential employees sign all sorts of agreements, just filled with fine print. This practice becomes problematic when employers make employees enter into unenforceable or unlawful agreements. Labor Code 432 helps employees and applicants to access these agreements. Specifically, it states that “If an employee or applicant signs any instrument relating to the obtaining or holding of employment, he shall be given a copy of the instrument upon request.”

You Have A Right To Your Personnel Records

The California Labor Code states that “[e]very current and former employee, or his or her representative, has the right to inspect and receive a copy of the personnel records that the employer maintains relating to the employee’s performance or to any grievance concerning the employee.” Upon request, employers must make the records available for inspection within 30 calendar days “at reasonable intervals and at reasonable times.”

Your Employer Must Provide You With Wage Records

Under Labor Code section 226, employers are required to maintain detailed, itemized records regarding wage records, which includes an employee’s (or former employee’s) wages, rates, type of wages, dates worked, hours worked, and deductions. In addition to maintaining these records, employers must allow “current and former employees the right to inspect or copy records pertaining to their employment, upon reasonable request to the employer”. Access to the records must be allowed within 21 calendar days of the request.

Let Moss Bollinger Work For You

You have many legal rights and protections as a Californian. If you have been the victim of your employer’s misconduct, or failure to provide you with a safe environment, then you may have a legal claim. If you want to seek relief, contact Moss Bollinger. We can help you obtain the records you are legally entitled to and will help you determine whether you have a claim. Let us stand up for your rights. We work on a contingency basis. Call our office today at (310) 982-2291 for a free consultation or reach us online.