According to the National Labor Relations Board, companies can not fire or discipline workers who criticize the company or their supervisor in social media.
The New York Times reports that the National Labor Relations Board agreed Monday to settle a case with a company that fired an employee after she posted disparaging remarks about a supervisor on her Facebook page from a home computer.
While her employer, American Medical Response, claimed that her statements did not qualify as protected activity, the National Labor Relations Board — for the first time — asserted that companies can not discipline workers who post criticisms on social-networking sites.
According to the NLRB, this employer will:
- Revise its “overly broad rules” to ensure that they do not improperly restrict employees from discussing wages, hours and working conditions with co-workers and others while not at work, and
- They will not discipline or discharge employees for engaging in such discussions.
Based on this clarification by the NLRB, I know a lot of companies who will be changing their social media policies right away.
Chris Boudreaux leads the Management Consulting practice at Converseon, where he helps leading brands to harness the power of social media to meet business objectives through his 18 years of experience in business process design, data integration, and governance. His work has been featured by industry researchers and journalists including Forrester and Gartner, and he founded SocialMediaGovernance.com, the foremost resource on governance in social media. Chris is co-author of The Social Media Management Handbook, and he has helped leading global corporations including Bank of America, Boeing, eBay, IBM, Kodak and Microsoft.
Email Chris Boudreaux
(415) 692-1250
@cboudreaux