When to Disclose "Travel Requirements" - And what are they exactly?

BALCA took the relatively unusual step of issuing an en banc decision in August in a case involving the Arbin Corporation, which apparently is a battery manufacturer based in Texas.

There were two key questions presented - first, when and what sorts of travel requirements must be disclosed in various advertisements and, second, whether there are any jobs in which travel is so inherent that it need not be mentioned (and can just be basically assumed by the job title). The Board frustratingly answered only the first.

The issue of travel or what exactly constitutes travel for the purposes of job advertisements has come up more and more in recent years, as more of the workforce goes remote (and surely will be even moreso post-COVID). Basically, the Arbin case confirms our conservative approach to listing any non-office travel - even local - is the best practice here. So for jobs like home health aides or janitorial staff that go to many local job sites throughout the week, we need all ads to list something like “daily travel within the metro area” as a job requirement or else the DOL could argue we did not fully list out all the requirements.

While I wish the Board had taken a more common sense approach to the question of whether local travel might be assumed in the cases of specific positions (not just the ones we customarily work on mentioned above, but anything else like electricians or plumbers or all manner of similar jobs), they did not, so we have to remain careful about always making sure to list the “daily travel” concept whenever we place any of the ads or postings required in the PERM process.