Essential Personnel Designation Notice

Summary

This is an essential personnel designation notice that employers may use to advise employees of their status as essential employees. This template includes practical guidance, drafting notes, and alternate and optional clauses. Employers may need to designate essential employees who must work during public health emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters, civil unrest, curfews, stay-at-home orders, or other emergency or crisis situations. For information on COVID-19 travel restrictions and essential workers, see StateNet Coronavirus Legislative and Regulatory Updates. Note if you do a Control F in StateNet Coronavirus Legislative and Regulatory Updates and search for "essential employee" or "essential worker," you will find some authority on determining who is an essential worker during COVID-19. Also, if you do a Control F in StateNet Coronavirus Legislative and Regulatory Updates and search for "travel", you will be able to find travel orders from various states, which often include sections providing guidance on which workers are considered essential workers. Another way to learn about state and local COVID-19 travel restrictions is to go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's COVID-19 Travel Planner and enter a city, zip code, or address to obtain information about travel restrictions and quarantine requirements in that area. For information on federal, state, and major local employment laws addressing the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, see Coronavirus (COVID-19) Federal and State Employment Law Tracker. For a resource kit focused on employees returning to work and broken up by key employment law topics, see Coronavirus (COVID-19) Resource Kit: Return to Work. For information on state and local COVID-19 face mask and employee screening laws, see Coronavirus (COVID-19) Employee Screening State and Local Law Survey and Coronavirus (COVID-19) Face Masks State Law Survey. For a practice note summarizing the various types of COVID-19 workplace cases that employees have filed against employers to date, along with an analysis of the frequency of these types of lawsuits to identify current litigation trends, see COVID-19 Workplace Litigation Trends.