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Worker Rights Extend To Facebook, Says NLRB
wjousts writes "American Medical Response of Connecticut had a policy that barred employees from depicting the company 'in any way' on Facebook or other social media. The National Labor Relations Board has ruled that this policy runs afoul of the National Labor Relations Act, which gives employees the right to form unions and prohibits employers from punishing workers for discussing working conditions."
Excuse me.
I live in a third world country.
We have mandatory minimum leave. We have a limit on hours worked (40 hours per week, max of 5 hours overtime - it's ILLEGAL to allow more, and if it happens you have to give the time back as time off in the SAME week to compensate), we have mandated 1-hour lunch breaks and mandated 15-minute coffee breaks at least once per 4 hours, we have complete health and safety coverage including a law that states that in the event of *any* injury on duty no matter how minor or severe the employer is legally liable for any and all direct and indirect medical expenses resulting from said injury (hence most employers have IOD insurance), employers are not allowed to discriminate (among other things this bans the creation of any rule that only applies to one gender, race etc), you aren't allowed to fire anybody unless they've had three written warnings, written warnings can only be issued after a hearing where the employee has the right to council...
Sorry - but the US is actually WORSE than at least some third world countries when it comes to workers rights.
Oh and in case you were wondering, our economy is growing and our corporations do just fine despite these laws.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
What the hell are you on about ?
How is labour laws that protect workers from exploitation (the ones who don't get those things in their contracts because there are plenty of other people who can do the job) equated to wellfare ?
There are NO tax dollars spent on ANY of those things. Nobody is giving the poor money here. What we ARE doing is making sure that those people who do their jobs get a fair and decent wage, decent safety conditions, holidays (which ARE a health and safety issue) etc. by making laws that employers are required to comply with.
If anything - those laws ENCOURAGE people to work. If your welfare check is better than the janitor job which is all you can get - of course you'll take wellfare. If the law makes sure that janitor job is better - then most people will take the job.
It's easy to say only "lazy" people can't get "Good jobs" - right - would you like to live in a country where there are no janitors at all ? No factory workers ? Where all the MacDonalds' have closed because there is nobody left who would possibly want to flip burgers to feed their kids ?
Sorry -but those people can't get your kind of benefits from negotiation - they have zero negotiating power, but they are still human beings and they deserve to have their human rights and human dignity protected by the state -that's the ONLY valid purpose the state has in fact ! This includes protecting those rights from unscrupulous employers. It also makes sound economic sense to establish labor laws that ensure employees will always be better off than welfare cases as it reduces your welfare burden.
How sad it must be to live in a country with such a narrowminded selfish culture that you honestly seem to believe that a law saying if you do your job you MUST be given at least 2 weeks holiday and if they fire you a fair hearing with council and a notice period with pay to find another job in so you don't lose your house and end up on the streets unable to ever do so... that laws like this are indistinguishable from WELLFARE to you
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
A distinction that's lost on many people is that "freedom of speech" in the US legal system applies to the government, not private entities. Put another way, North Korea is a bad point of comparison when talking about corporate policy.
Now, should the protection of freedom of speech apply to corporate policy? I would say yes. In my ideal world, basic human rights would be encoded into the law in such a way that they cannot be circumvented by private entities in any way. But the law in reality does not say that this is the case.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
If you want a significantly different picture from your own employment experience, read about what was going on in the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia before the big accident. Or the many workers who are killed or maimed in preventable industrial accidents. Or the retail workers forced to work longer than the hours they put on their time card. Or the workers fired for trying to unionize. Or the workers fired for complaining about safety regulation violations. Or even better, get to know some blue-collar folks and hear about their life on the job.
All those things are illegal, but the problem is the laws are laxly enforced when they're enforced at all.
The mine "accident" was caused by an action by the company they'd been repeatedly fined for. The corporations consider these fines just a cost of doing business.
Now, if a normal person breaks a law and someone dies as a result, they'll be charged with negligent homicide at the very least. I'm appalled that nobody in power at the mining company was criminally charged, but I'm not surprised.
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