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Feds: Your Employer Can't Stop You From Recording Conversations At Work (huffingtonpost.com)
schwit1 writes with news about a ruling by the National Labor Relations Board about your right to record conversations at work. The Huffington Post reports: "If you're looking to catch your boss breaking labor law, that smartphone in your pocket might be your best friend, thanks to a new ruling from federal officials. On Thursday, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that upscale grocer Whole Foods cannot forbid employees from recording conversations or taking photographs at work without a supervisor's permission. (Local laws, however, could still come into play in certain situations, as several states require the consent of two parties in order for a conversation to be recorded legally.) At the center of the case were stipulations in Whole Foods' 'General Information Guide,' an employee manual laying out worker do's and don'ts. The guide prohibited workers from taking photos or recording conversations inside a store 'unless prior approval is received' from a manager or executive, or 'unless all parties to the conversation give their consent.'"
They can't "blanket" stop all circumstances where someone would be filming, that doesn't make all filming at work legitimate or legal though.
And yet the neither the summary nor the title said or implied any such thing. The summary even explicitly says in the fourth sentence:
(Local laws, however, could still come into play in certain situations, as several states require the consent of two parties in order for a conversation to be recorded legally.)
This one line from the summary shouldn't be ignored: "(Local laws, however, could still come into play in certain situations, as several states require the consent of two parties in order for a conversation to be recorded legally.)"
Here's a map of 'eavesdropping' (recording) laws by state:
http://www.vegress.com/can-i-r...
Washington, California, Nevada, Montana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and Florida all seem to require two-party notification before recording conversations, otherwise it's deemed as 'eavesdropping' and illegal.
...Can anyone remember when laws were made by elected officials?...
Laws still are made by elected officials. Those elected officials made the laws that gave the power to the Federal agencies to issue rulings such as the one under discussion here.
That doesn't seem to mesh with what we were taught in school.
Your should have paid more attention.
That's North Carolina, all right. But what does that have to do with an animal farm?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It seems like nowadays some federal agency steps in and declares that they're the governing authority on something, that their decisions are law, and everyone should obey.
Because it is. Congress delegates authority to executive agencies to handle the pesky details that congress doesn't want to deal with because they have important things to do like raise funds for their election campaigns. The courts have been fine with it so long as Congress spells out the limits and so long as the agency doesn't overstep their bounds. For this case, the NLRB has jurisdiction over private sector labor disputes and so can make a ruling like they did. Still subject to local laws, as pointed out in the summary.
Can anyone remember when laws were made by elected officials? It seems like nowadays some federal agency steps in and declares that they're the governing authority on something, that their decisions are law, and everyone should obey.
That is how it has been since the signing of the Constitution. The legislature makes laws, the executive branch makes regulations, and the judicial branch makes case law. All three are types of law. Some are done by elected officials others aren't. All three are necessary components of a functioning legal system. Congress does not and never has passed laws that are fully fleshed out to every detail. And that's a good thing because Congress is clearly not filled with domain experts for most subjects. The legislature sets the framework and the executive branch makes it work. They delegate this authority to federal agencies who then issue regulations filling in the details. It has ALWAYS worked like this. ALWAYS.
That doesn't seem to mesh with what we were taught in school. Aren't our lawmakers elected?
Sounds like you got some bad schooling. Many lawmakers are elected in all three branches of government. Others are appointed. It's been that way since the dawn of the republic in the US.
A conversation recorded by one of its participants is never "eavesdropping". If that is the rationale used by those promoting two-party consent laws, then they either don't know what words mean, or they're deliberately trying to confuse people.
I'm not seeing the issue. The summary only says that your employer can't stop you. It doesn't say or imply that state law can't stop you.
As an employer, I can kinda understand Whole Foods' situation here. If you prohibit photos and recordings in the workplace, the workers' rights folks claim you're trying to hide abuses in the workplace. If you don't prohibit photos and recordings in the workplace, the privacy rights folks claim you're not doing enough to protect your employees' privacy in the workplace (essentially extending the corporate shield to also protect your employees from liability, not just the owners).
By letting the government make the ruling, the matter is settled and the company doesn't have to worry about liability either way.
This sort of thing is a good lesson for those who erroneously believe in absolutes (the tone of TFA is that there is a "right" and "wrong" answer to this). It is exceptionally rare for a single principle on any issue to always be correct. There is almost always a situation where that principle will be wrong because some other principle will overrule it. In this case, you have the right to privacy in the workplace butting heads with the right to publicize workplace abuses. I'm not sure what the correct balance is, and I'm not sure the government does either. But at least this way the company doesn't get caught in the crossfire. All a company has to do is comply with the government ruling, and the fight over the correct balance will bypass them and go straight to the courts. So even though Whole Foods lost the case, they still won.
The very headline implies just such a thing. The specific thing at issue in this case was the WF handbook banned recording of 'Team Meetings'. The NLRB found that PARTICULAR thing illegal, because 'team meetings' could include union organizing activities, and by law, the company can not interfere with those. This ruling in NO WAY bans ALL company prohibitions on recording, only ones that interfere with origanization activities. And that has nothing to do with any local laws.
No it doesn't. It explicitly says "your employer".
What exactly is the issue here? The creation of federal agencies is derived directly from the Constitution
Well, the real actual issue is that the Constitution doesn't grant any kind of NRLB power to the Feds - that's a state problem, should States wish to deal with it (per the 10th Amendment). All the Founding Fathers, including Hamilton, wrote about the limitations of Congress's delegated powers before Ratification, it's discussed in the minutes of the Constitutional Convention, and all of them excepting Hamilton wrote about it after the Ratification. It's just widely ignored today while the Constitution is paid lip service to placate the masses.
Hamilton wanted an Empire ruled by oligarchs, and that's what ignoring the Constitution has gotten us. Not that it wasn't destined to fail eventually, but since we're talking about what the Constitution allows, we can assume it could have worked as designed to present day for the sake of argument.
and backed up by 200 years of case law.
Yes, judges are cronies and bureaucrats, not activists for the Constitution, with very, very, few exceptions. "We've investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing" - the moment people stop buying that line, society will improve by one notch.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Do you have a reading comprehension problem? The headline is WRONG. The ruling does NOT say your employer can not prohibit you from recording. The ruling says your employer can't issue a recording ban in such a way that would interfere with things protected by section 7 of the NLRA (unionization). It does NOT say they can't prevent you from recording ANYTHING ELSE.
I'm not seeing the issue. The summary only says that your employer can't stop you. It doesn't say or imply that state law can't stop you.
And that is wrong, but in this case I'll give them a pass since the rest of the media also seems to be reading this ruling entirely wrong.
Here's the KEY phrase which nobody is paying attention to, from the actual ruling:
if employees are acting in concert for their mutual aid and protection and no overriding employer interest is present.
What the ruling was about was situations where the employees were recording potential misdeeds or illegal activity (related to unions, etc.) There are MANY situations where the employer has an obvious interest, such as protecting trade secrets or customer information.
And more to the point, it only addresses rules which prohibit actual recording. It does not at all address rules which say things like "no cell phones or cameras are allowed on the property".
Because this is about Section 7 activities, which is about unions. Unions are a form of socialistic governance. Even actual Marxist socialist claim this. I personally see that unions are needed to push back against corporate worker rights violations, and without them there would be no overtime, we'd still have child labor, and a whole host of what amounts to corporate slavery. No union in the USA is advocating any socialistic overthrow of the government anymore; my citation is from 1936. And of course not all socialism is Marxist in nature, nor is it authoritarianism automatically. I'm a Sanders supporter, and I know his ideas are not in any way Marxist. But still, there is a very real historical joining here.
Unions are not socialism. Unions do not advocate community control of production. The tie between socialism and Unions has been made by the Employers to discredit unions. Granted many union leaders have socialist tendencies but Unions do not have any explicit tie to socialism.
Socialism: a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.