US employment law

Not legal advice

Keel’s employment summaries are our own plain-English paraphrases of the statutes we cite, written to help you run a compliance program. They are not legal advice, not a substitute for counsel, and not a complete statement of your obligations. Verify against the cited primary law and your own circumstances, and consult a qualified employment lawyer before acting. Local (city and county) ordinances are out of scope and are not covered.

US employment compliance is usually the obligation set that lands on HR rather than the security team, and it is the one most often run out of a spreadsheet. Keel tracks it the same way it tracks SOC 2 or ISO 27001: as a requirement set with owners, status, and evidence.

How the model works

Employment obligations come from two layers, and Keel keeps them separate on purpose.

The federal baseline applies nationwide regardless of where you employ people. It is a single framework in the catalog (US Employment Law - Federal Baseline, available on Core plans), covering wage and hour, leave, pay equity, benefits, worker classification, anti-discrimination, health and safety, labor relations, workplace privacy, termination, and posting and recordkeeping.

State overlays carry only the deltas beyond that floor: where a state adds an obligation, exceeds the federal minimum, or does something different. An overlay never repeats the federal requirement, so you are not reading the same rule 51 times. Keel authors overlays for all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Which overlays apply depends entirely on where you employ people, so Keel asks rather than guesses.

Recording your operating states

Go to Frameworks → US Employment Law → Set operating states, or straight to /frameworks/employment. Tick every state you have employees in, including fully-remote staff who live somewhere you have no office. Changing this needs workspace-admin rights, because it changes what everyone in the workspace sees as their obligations.

With nothing selected you see the federal baseline alone. That is deliberate: Keel does not infer a footprint from your billing address or your headcount, because presenting the wrong state’s obligations is worse than presenting none.

Once saved, the page groups every applicable requirement by topic, and each one is labelled with its source, either Federal or the named state it comes from. You always know which layer a given obligation is coming from.

What each requirement carries

• A plain-English summary of the obligation, written by Keel.
• The statute or regulation it paraphrases, cited so you can check our reading against the actual law rather than taking our word for it.
• An applies-to note where the obligation only bites above a size or coverage threshold (for example, some requirements begin at 15 or 50 employees).
• Dated data points for anything that changes over time, such as a dollar figure or a threshold, carried with the date it was verified instead of being baked into prose. This is why you will see obligations described by mechanism (“adjusts annually”) rather than by a number that would silently go stale.

Controls and crosswalks

Applying the framework creates the canonical controls that discharge these obligations, such as worker classification review, statutory leave administration, benefit plan administration, an anti-discrimination and accommodation program, workplace notices, protected-activity review, and workforce-reduction notice assessment. Several obligations are covered by controls you may already have: personnel security handles background-check procedure and I-9 verification, the retention schedule carries the payroll, EEO, and I-9 retention minimums, and the health and safety program covers the general duty, the injury log, and severe-incident reporting.

Crosswalks here are deliberately sparse. Employment obligations mostly do not overlap the security frameworks, and Keel does not claim overlap that would not survive an auditor asking why. Notably, security-awareness training is not crosswalked to mandated anti-harassment training: they share a delivery mechanism but not their required content, so one does not satisfy the other.

What is not covered

• Local ordinances. City and county rules can impose obligations beyond the state layer and are not in scope.
• Non-US employment law. The framework is US-only.
• Legal advice. See the caution at the top of this page. Keel helps you run the program; it does not tell you what the law requires of you in your specific circumstances.