Can an employer force all employees to open bank accounts in the employees&#39; names? [asking regarding federal law in the U.S.A. only] Recently I have noticed low wage employers such as fast food and retail requiring employees to open a bank account through the employer. Such employers insist that, by policy, they only pay through a company-issued debit card and will not pay using traditional methods such as a paycheck. Some also offer to arrange direct deposit with a bank, but will not offer any other form of pay. Word of mouth seems to be that these policies are illegal, but I have had difficulty finding information on this topic that is not from the card-issuing entities. Can a U.S.-based employer legally mandate their employees open a bank account upon hiring? If employers can or cannot, what section of the law defines who can and cannot compel a citizen into banking against the citizen's will?
Under federal law, an employer may impose direct deposit as a condition of employment. The Electronic Funds Transfer Act at 15 USC 1693k only says that employers may not require an employee to have a bank account at a particular bank: No person may— (1) condition the extension of credit to a consumer on such consumer’s repayment by means of preauthorized electronic fund transfers; or (2) require a consumer to establish an account for receipt of electronic fund transfers with a particular financial institution as a condition of employment or receipt of a government benefit. If the employee is allowed to choose their bank, then such a condition is legal under this law. The government's interpretation of this law is clarified in 12 CFR 1005 Supplement I at 10(e)(2): Payroll. An employer (including a financial institution) may not require its employees to receive their salary by direct deposit to any particular institution. An employer may require direct deposit of salary by electronic means if employees are allowed to choose the institution that will receive the direct deposit. Alternatively, an employer may give employees the choice of having their salary deposited at a particular institution (designated by the employer) or receiving their salary by another means, such as by check or cash. That said, individual states can create their own legislation, and many have made it illegal under state law for an employer to require direct deposit. You didn't name a particular state so I can't be more specific, but there is a chart here created by a payroll company showing the legality of such policies by state. Note that in some sense, the employee is not really being "compelled" or "mandated" to have a bank account - if the employer insists on using direct deposit, the employee is free to go look for a different job. US law does tend to recognize that there is a major power imbalance in employer-employee relationships, so there are many regulations; but at its root, it's treated as a contract between two independent parties who may each set whatever conditions they want, and enter into the contract only if they can agree. In contexts other than employment, I would expect even fewer restrictions on how a bank account could be set as a condition for something. For instance, it could be a condition for using a particular product or service. Again, if you don't want to open a bank account, you are free to not use that product or service.
It doesn't seem as if the bank is discriminating in the way you suggest. They offer two types of account: (A) accrues or charges interest and (B) does not accrue or charge interest. The bank says you can choose A or B whatever your religion. You the customer choose A or B, possibly depending on your religion. So I do not see what cause of action you have or what damages you have suffered. Therefore I don't think you could sue them.
You can't just interpret the word &quot;require&quot; in isolation, you have to focus on what is allowed vs. disallowed by law. Guidance point K.1 starts with the rhetorical question Under the ADA, Title VII, and other federal employment nondiscrimination laws, may an employer require all employees physically entering the workplace to be vaccinated for COVID-19? They respond that no federal EEO laws prohibit such a requirement &quot;subject to the reasonable accommodation provisions of Title VII and the ADA and other EEO considerations&quot; (thus providing an answer to the question whether it can always be &quot;required&quot;. However, they do not discuss the possibility that other laws (non-EEO, state, local: also contract law) that would prevent an employer from &quot;requiring&quot; a vaccination. They do not elaborate on ways that an employer might &quot;require&quot; a vaccination, leaving it to the inventive reader to figure out what legal leverage a company might have to get compliance. Assaulting non-compliant employees is not legal; withholding wages is not legal. Reassigning a non-compliant worker to working in the sub-basement may be legal, requiring a non-compliant worker to wear an anti-vaxer warning badge might be legal. Firing the employee, or reducing their hours to 0 until they comply, might be legal. But the EEOC is not advising employers in safe ways to sanction non-compliant workers, they are just stating their interpretation of applicable anti-discrimination law. Indeed, they can only address matters of discrimination, because that is what they address in general. They do not write the labor law regulations, that's the job of the Dept. of Labor. They are not giving legal advice as to the scope of allowed requirements set by employers.
There is no intention to commit theft, so there is no criminal act on the part of the customer. Even if there was a criminal act, the ability of the restaurant to detain the cusomer (citizen's arrest) is very limited in most jurisdictions. The restaurant can ask the customer for his name and address, but there is no legal obligation on the customer to provide this. Refusal to do so, however, might be evidence of intention to avoid paying and at that point the restaurant might call the police. The customer can leave, and the restaurant can pursue the debt through the civil courts if they have means to do so - they may have CCTV of the customer and his car registration which can be traced. Petrol stations, where people often fill up and then realise they can't pay, usually have established "promise to pay" procedures where they take the customer's details and the customer has 48 hours to pay before police or civil enforcement action is taken.
The statement "you don't need to put it in writing" is not an instruction, and should not be interpreted as on in lieu of other evidence (e.g. the follow-up question "you don't want to get fired, do you?"). It is, at best, a recognition that your concerns have already been noted (and at worst, a ham-handed threat). In the context of an at-will non-union position, it is legal for a boss to directly demand "take it or leave it, no back-talk allowed". The reduction in salary can't go below the statutory minimum, or otherwise circumvent any laws, but assuming that the new salary is per se legal, they can demand that you accept it and not argue. If this were a government position, there is a potential (but not guaranteed) First Amendment issue.
Caveat: This answer applies to private sector union workers in the U.S. The considerations that apply to public sector unions are very different. Also, as I discuss below, there are special labor relations law rules that apply to a few specific private sector industries that are pertinent to these questions. The legal framework largely flows out of the National Labor Relations Act and the cases decided under it by the National Labor Relations Board (which is the first instance trial court in most union-management disputes), the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the various circuits, and the U.S. Supreme Court. But, I have not cited chapter and verse of particular statutory sections and cases supporting this analysis for lack of space and time (it would normally take up about a third of a one semester law school class on labor law to cover the points summarily answered below). What are the lawful requirements of Company A in bargaining? There is an obligation to negotiate in good faith and to make available some information necessary to allow that to be possible. The employer also can't fire an employee for insisting on negotiations in good faith with the union or for union activity. Is there a minimal salary that must be offered (apart from minimum wage laws)? No. Also, in some industries, the employer needs to pay the &quot;prevailing wage&quot; in order to get government contract which are critical to its business and basically amount to the union negotiated wage at comparable firms. What happens if Company A and the union do not agree to terms? There is no collective bargaining agreement and the employer's terms are in force when the existing collective bargaining agreement expires. Usually, if this happens, the workers then go on strike rather than working under the unilaterally employer imposed contract terms, until a new collective bargaining agreement is negotiated (and the vast majority of the time, a new collective bargaining agreement is negotiated after some period of time when the workers are on strike). But, sometimes a prior collective bargaining agreement will establish an arbitration resolution if there is a deadlock. Arbitration is also used to resolve deadlocks, if I recall correctly, in a few key industries with large employers where avoiding a strike is critical to the nation's economy (outside the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Act) that are established by statute. Can company A elect to hire people from outside the union &quot;at-will&quot; while negotiating with the union? Yes. These people are often pejoratively called &quot;scabs&quot; and neutrally called &quot;replacement workers&quot;. Generally speaking, when a strike is over, the business has to take back all of the striking workers, and fire all of the replacement workers, except to the extent that the business whose workers went on strike had vacancies when the strike started. In part, this is because this is a term of the new collective bargaining agreement and in part as a consequence of the requirement that employers not retaliate against employees for union activities. In states that are not &quot;right to work&quot; states, the union can prevent non-union replacement workers from being hired at all after the strike is over. Could Company A continue to do so indefinitely, essentially no longer employing the union members and just hiring a new group? More or less. I can't easily summarize the case law on the point and prior collective bargaining agreement terms can be relevant. Also, there are a few sectors of the economy (mostly the stage play industry, the movie industry, and the construction industry), in which unionization is structured on the basis of professions for an entire industry, or the entire industry in a geographical region, rather than on an employer by employer basis. This tactic doesn't work in those industries. The common thread is that work in these industries is organized on a project by project basis (i.e. a particular play, a particular movie, or a particular construction project), in which the firm paying for the project is usually a single project only entity. Another important bright line rule is that an employer always has the right to shut down the business covered by the union entirely, rather than deal with the union. But, this is why unions tend to be more effective in industries with large employers who can't replace the employees very easily with non-union workers (like factories and ship yards, and grocery store chains). Is this basically saying that the only power unions ultimately have is to quite en masse and make it difficult for the company to hire replacements? Basically. But, the power to strike is considerable in most unionized employment contexts and many people won't &quot;cross a picket line&quot; in solidarity with striking workers. From a consumer's perspective, not crossing a picket line means not patronizing a business whose workers are on strike. But, not crossing a picket line can also mean that workers (usually at a unionized business that is a vendor to the business whose worker's are on strike, or that deliver things to the business whose worker's are on strike) will refuse to participate in doing business with the business whose worker's are on strike. So, even if enough replacement workers can be found to continue to operate the business, this doesn't necessarily mean that a business won't face very severe consequences for continuing to operate with replacement workers while its regular workers are on strike. Furthermore, unions can take other actions short of strikes, like staying on the job and &quot;working to rule&quot; strictly refusing to show any flexibility beyond the bare requirements of their existing contract or the new one, or pursuing every single minor bump and scratch as a worker's compensation claim, reporting every Occupational Safety and Health Administration violation, or pursuing unfair labor practices litigation against the employer. Private sector unions are declining, in part, due to the ability of employers to hire replacement workers. Still, this is one reason for the long and steady decline of unionization in the private sector U.S. labor market (although the trend has reversed a bit in the last several years). Consider, for example, the following chart (via Wikipedia): As I recapped the economic history of labor action in the American workforce as of December 2010: [There have been] six general strikes in U.S. history, one in 1919 in Seattle, and four in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, one in Toledo, one in Minneapolis, one in San Francisco and one at West Coast Ports. There was also a general strike in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in 1998. The last one in the English Speaking United States was 76 years ago, and very few people living today remember it. The United States has never had a nationwide general strike and just two general strikes in its history, one restricted to a single industry, and the other to a U.S. territory, extended beyond a single city. Union-management relations in the United States used to look a lot like they do in Europe. Strikes were large, frequent and involved a large share of the work force. National guard forces or private security forces were frequently called in to put them down in bloody conflicts. Openly socialist political parties were organized. In 1950, a year that revisionist history remembers as a tranquil period in American history, there were 424 strikes involving 1,000 or more workers, in all involving 1,698,000 workers, which was more than one in nine members of the unionized workforce of 14.3 million workers who made up 31.5% of the total work force. In 2008, there were 15 strikes involving 1,000 or more workers, in all including 72,000 workers which was one in two-hundred and twenty-three members of the unionized workforce of 16.1 million workers who made up 12.4% of the total workforce. The public sector which is 36.8% unionized, is as unionized as the private sector was at its peak. The private sector, which is 7.2% unionized, has the lowest level of unionization in the private sector since the 1920s, if not earlier. The unionized workforce has remained more or less constant for half a century, despite a growing workforce, and that masks the fact that there has been substantial growth in public sector union membership and a substantial decline in private sector union membership over that time period. The United States, there has been only one year since 1983 that more than 3% of unionized workers went on strike (1986), and there has only been one year since 1998 (the year 2000) when more than one in eighty union members went on strike. In the entire United States from 1990 to 2008, there wasn't a single year that there were more than 45 strikes involving 1,000 or more workers in the entire United States, in a period that started with a labor force of 103 million workers and peaked at just short of 130 million workers. In contrast, there wasn't a single year from 1950 to 1987 that had less than 46 strikes, despite that fact that the workforce was significantly smaller. Prior to the 1980s there were a couple hundred major strikes in the United States per year, about ten times current levels of labor action. I updated this account in 2014 and 2015: There were thirteen major strikes that took place at least in part in 2015 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly tables. This is just two more than in the year 2014, which had fewer major strikes which involved fewer workers than any year from 1947-2013 except 2009, a low point of the financial crisis. Most of the half century before WWII also had more major strikes (at least proportionate to the size of the population) than there are these days. In all of the United States in 2014, there were just 11 strikes involve 1,000 or more workers, which involved a total of 34,000 workers and resulted in 200,000 work-days idle, which was less than 0.01% (i.e. less than 1 day in 10,000) of the total working time of the American labor force. The year 2015 was the next most peaceful year in post-WWII labor history. The year 2010 also had just 11 major strikes, but those strikes involved more workers and produced more days idle. There were just 5 major strikes in 2009 in the United States which involved fewer workers than in 2014 and fewer days idle. This has a lot to do with the decline of private sector unions in the United States. . . . Just under half of union members are in the public sector and public sector unions, as a rule in the United States, have limited or non-existent rights to strike (although teachers unions which are a huge part of total number of public sector union members can frequently strike). In 2014, just 0.001% of the working time of the American labor was idle due to strikes or lockouts. The last year than more than 0.01% of the working time of the American labor force was idle was 2000. The last year that 0.10% or more of the working tie of the American labor force was idle was 1978. Only one year from 1948 to 1959, a time often nostalgically remembered as the &quot;good old days&quot; by conservatives was below the 0.10% threshold. Nationally, in 2014, the private sector 6.6% (7.4%) of employees were members of unions (represented by unions), while in the public sector 35.7% (39.2%) of employees were members of unions (represented by unions), with both percentages generally tending to fall over the previous decade. Within the public sector, nationally, union representation rates are highest with local government employees (45.5%), intermediate with state government employees (32.8%), and lowest with federal employees (31.6%). In the United States in the year 2020 the union membership rate (the percentage of wage and salary workers who were members of unions) was 10.8 percent. . . . the union membership rate in the public sector was 34.8 percent, while the rate in the private sector was 6.3 percent.
Certain kinds of pay secrecy measures are illegal under the National Labor Relations Act, a 1935 law. It's not the strongest prohibition, however, because the consequences of violating it are rather weak (especially compared to other employment claims). Some government entities or contractors are under more stringent rules by executive order, and states may have their own laws. Here's a Department of Labor fact sheet. Here's a 2014 NPR story on the subject.
Raise the question with your employer If you believe that you are an employee and not a contractor then there is presumably something you want from your employer. This may be additional wages and entitlements that you would have or will become entitled to for past or future work respectively. Or you may have been injured and want workers' compensation. Or terminated and you want redundancy pay. Whatever it is, work it out and raise the issue with your employer. You might want to consult an accountant or union to help you. They may acknowledge that you were incorrectly classified and give you what you want. Winner, winner, chicken dinner! Or they may dispute it. If so, you need to follow the dispute resolution processes at your workplace. These typically involve informal discussions, escalating to mediation and then to a workplace tribunal run by the government. You will almost certainly want to consult a lawyer or union to help you - given that you don't know where to start the learning curve is likely to be too steep. In virtually every jurisdiction if people are employees at law they can't choose not to be. in british-columbia the relevant law appears to be the Employment Standards Act although it's not unheard of in edge cases for a person to be an employee under one law (e.g. workers' compensation) and a contractor under another (e.g. income tax). From the linked site: The overriding question is “whose business is it?” Is the person who is doing the work doing it as a person in business for themselves? If you are working "for" your own business you are probably a contractor. If you are working "for" your employer's business you are probably an employee. For example, if you are an accountant with several dozen clients, maintain your own business premises and charge for your advice based on the amount quoted rather than by the hour, you're a contractor. If instead, you have 2 clients, work from their premises at set hours and get paid by the day or week, you're an employee with 2 jobs. In edge cases these are not cut and dried - Google are Uber driver's employees. In Australia: no. In California: yes. In the UK: yes.