Workplace Information Forcing : Constitutionality and Effectiveness

“Know-your-rights” posters are ubiquitous in the American workplace, as employers are required by statute or regulation to display numerous notices about workers' rights on the job. These posters were relatively uncontroversial until a recent set of lawsuits by employer groups attempted, on statutory and constitutional grounds, to block rules that would require notices about workers' rights to form a union and bargain collectively. The lawsuits have produced mixed results in the courts. Using these recent cases, as well as the few prior cases that challenged other notice posting rules, this article addresses the constitutionality of workplace notice posting requirements. It then examines the effectiveness of notice posting rules, considering how such rules might best be structured to accomplish their first-order goals of informing workers about their rights and their second-order goals of spurring enforcement action to improve the conditions of work