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Feds Settle Case of Woman Fired Over Facebook Posts
Mr.Intel writes "Employers should think twice before trying to restrict workers from talking about their jobs on Facebook or other social media. That's the message the government sent on Monday as it settled a closely watched lawsuit against a Connecticut ambulance company that fired an employee after she went on Facebook to criticize her boss in 2009."
Nor should it. A company should be able to block, or not block, anything they want on company property.
Gone!
No just kidding I fucking love my job.
TBH, I think employers in the States are a little presumptuous over the lives of those who work for them.
Meddling with your employees only turns them against you. Stop it.
If you are worried about what people will say about you over social networking sites, then it's time to have better policies that make sense to everyone, and consider your employees first, but this doesn't cover disloyalty, so if you work for Pepsi or Coke and you drink the other company's products on your social media you could still be fired.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Agreed! But they should not be able fire people for criticizing their bosses or their employer.
Concerted activity is protected regardless of the medium of communication. In order for workers to organize to improve their lives, they must be free to discuss wages or conditions without facing retaliation from their bosses. In practice this is rarely the case, especially since most workers lack a union to back up their rights. It's good that the courts didn't take capital's side for once.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
...I should be able to fire them, for whatever reason I choose. I guess that's the way it was before freedom of association in America was killed off. It may be bad business, and I personally wouldn't want to work for anyone who had such a stringent policy, but any employer should be free to make such decisions, and be free to either benefit or suffer the consequences.
Of course they do. The problem was they always had that freedom while the underlings didn't.
So if one of my employees writes somewhere that he thinks I'm a moron or he insults my wife or spreads nasty rumors about my sex life I just have to keep happily giving him my money?
That's crazy.
if you're seen drinking a competitors beer. Plus there's been several stories of people fired for political bumper stickers because the company owner didn't agree (it's always right wing bosses firing left wings employees too...).
I'm surprised this woman could fight. Looks like she won because of Union laws. Once again, yay for Unions.
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So if one of my employees writes somewhere that he thinks I'm a moron or he insults my wife or spreads nasty rumors about my sex life I just have to keep happily giving him my money?
That's crazy.
Yes, that's exactly what this states. Because his private conversations in a private place, or even his public conversations in a public place, on his or her own time, are absolutely none of your business.
From a professional standpoint.
Just like if one of your employees went to a bar after work and was ranting about you. You would have no justification in firing them for their behavior off the clock like that.
You are paying for your employee's time, knowledge, and skills. You have to earn their loyalty and respect.
Nope. Libel and slander are still on the books. Not to mention there's plenty of ways to fire them without bringing up their online behavior.
That's right. Due to this oppressive legal ruling, you can no longer fire your boss for sharing their negative opinion of you online.
Exactly, in the eyes of the legal system you cannot punish them as a boss, you must address it as if it were your neighborhood posting those things.
Behold, Lamebook captured it all so well in one post
I think you are wrong.
Putting something in print is "publishing" it and thus you extend that to "putting something on Facebook is publishing because it uses text and it is observable by the public". This is IMO false. A status update on Facebook isn't publishing, at least not in the same way that putting an ad in the paper or writing a newspaper article is publishing, nor is it like writing a lengthy blog post. It is more like saying something in public, only you are doing it with text.
Also, where you live it might be legal to randomly fire people (I know certain US states think it's perfectly reasonable to allow companies to fire you for no reason at all), in a lot of places someone writing something bad about their employer in the paper might be likely to end up with them fired, if the bad things claimed in the paper are false, if they are correct it is more likely that the employer will be afraid to fire the employee because they know the employee will be back with a union-paid lawyer to discuss the unlawful firing of an employee. There are plenty of laws protecting whistleblowers.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
But then the nature of what they say shouldn't be considered.
Firing someone for using facebook at work would seem a little extreme. A simple request to stop doing that would be considered a more measured first response.
I didn't think you were right at first, but it turns out you are!
The legal arguement in this case was:
Lafe Solomon, the board’s counsel, said: “This is a fairly straightforward case under the National Labor Relations Act — whether it takes place on Facebook or at the water cooler, it was employees talking jointly about working conditions, in this case about their supervisor, and they have a right to do that.”
That act gives workers a federally protected right to form unions, and it prohibits employers from punishing workers — whether union or nonunion — for discussing working conditions or unionization.
Additionally, this is a federal labor law, so it applies even in states with At Will employment laws.
If your boss being an asshole is a trade secret, that's a big red flag.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
There's this old joke that in the GDR the reason it was illegal to say that the politbureau is inapt and incompetent wasn't slander, it was giving out state secrets.
And, bluntly, I have been working in a few companies that knew quite well that they were doing a bad job and used NDAs to keep that from leaking. You really start to look down at "professionals" when the only thing that makes them "professional" is that they do it for money.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The way I heard it during the 1960s was that some guy ran into Red Square yelling, "Khrushchev is a fool!" and ended up going to prison for 30 years -- five years for publicly insulting the Premier and 25 years for revealing a state secret.
One might guess similar jokes have circulated concerning other dictatorships over the years.
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Just like in China, bureaucracies often make a shitload of rules just to give the higher ups a toolbox of excuses to remove people they don't like.
When everybody's breaking the rules you get to be picky about who you punish.
Doubly so if your boss can get away with using at will employment as a backdoor loophole for whatever prejudices he wouldn't dare put down in writing or mention in earshot of potential witnesses.