Two bills on providing employee information that survived last week’s cutoff are up for hearings this week in the Senate. They were included in last week’s roundup of bills.

Employee personnel records

HB 1320 requires employers to turn over a complete copy of an employee’s personnel records (or a statement of discharge) to current or former employees on request within 14 calendar days and establishes penalties for failure to do so. We last wrote about the bill here.

In the House committee, the bill was amended to clarify that while an employee request for their personnel records is treated as a request under the bill and not the Public Records Act, investigation records for labor law or other violations can be redacted. On the House floor, an amendment was added that public employers bear the burden of proving that such redactions were made in good faith, and that public employers could be liable under the bill for bad faith redactions. It passed out of the House on March 1 with a 56-40 vote.

AWC has concerns but has been working to improve the bill – we will continue to ask for a longer time frame to comply (at least 30 days) to make it more manageable for smaller cities with limited capacity to handle such potentially large requests.

Providing employee info to unions

The current version of HB 1200 requires public employers to provide certain employee information – including work and personal contact information, date of hire, salary, and jobsite location – to public employee unions. Employers have 21 days to provide information on new hires, and must provide it again every 120 days for all employees in each bargaining unit. There is no provision for an employee to opt out of having their information shared.

Most of the information covered in the bill was already required to be shared with unions under current law, but current requirements don’t have as many formal deadlines or lists of what needs to be included – leaving that up to negotiation between the employer and union. AWC had concerns about the early bill drafts but was able to improve the bill in the House to contain more reasonable and attainable timelines for updating unions with employee information. The bill passed out of the House on a 56-41 vote on March 2.

Dates to remember

HB 1320 and HB 1200 are both scheduled for public hearings in the Senate Labor & Commerce Committee on March 16 at 8 am.