Recently, several local lawyers and I participated in a labor and employment law roundtable for The Legal Intelligencer.
Actually, the table was rectangular. But, the coffee and muffins were free, so I didn’t complain.
Well, not until I dropped my pants and mooned the employee-rights lawyers on the panel. Trust me, they had it coming.
A teacher getting in trouble for something having to do with Facebook?
You don’t say…
The full story, plus another state has passed a social media workplace privacy law. I’ve got it all for you after the jump…
Over the past several years, seemingly, we’re seen the NLRB take a more active interest in employee handbooks.
We’ve certainly seen it with respect to social media policies; especially, where these policies purport to limit the rights of employees to discuss their employment with one another. This is because Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act allows employees to discuss their terms and conditions of employment together.
And you don’t need to have a union either. The act applies in most every private-sector workplace.
Last month, a daughter’s Facebook post cost her father an $80K age-discrimination settlement (more on that here).
Last week, with some Facebook shenanigans, the plaintiff in a sexual harassment case screwed herself over.
(See what I did there?)
Yesterday, the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission held a public meeting at which it discussed, well, you read the lede. Don’t miss this one employers; the full 411 is after the jump…
Back in 2011, when y’all were Tebowing, planking and winning, I was blogging about this case where an employer allegedly updated its employee’s Facebook page and tweeted from her Twitter account without her permission while she was on leave from work following a car accident.
The Stored Communications Act prohibits intentional, unauthorized access to electronically stored communications. The employer admitted that it had accessed the employee’s social media accounts. However, it claimed that it had permission because the employee left her passwords stored on a company server. So, the employer moved for summary judgment.
Opposing the motion, the employee argued that, while the company did possess the account passwords, she had told them to leave their digital fingers off of her social media accounts. This would have made the access unauthorized.
I’ll bet the father didn’t “like” that so much.
Get it?
Dad is the former headmaster at a school in Florida. When the school failed to renew his employment contract, he sued for age discrimination and retaliation. Eventually the two sides settled, with the school to pay $10,000 in back pay, $80,000 as a “1099”, and $60,000 to dad’s attorneys.
The other day, Deadspin tweeted this headline:
The Employer Handbook Blog
Carlos Martinez’s Twitter favorites: a big ol’ wall of porn http://t.co/SA3qss6nrr
— Deadspin (@Deadspin) February 24, 2014
That social media policy of yours. The one in which you begrudgingly tolerate employee social media use on their own time and roadblock their efforts to use it at work.
You may want to revise it. ASAP!
Chad Brooks at Business News Daily reports here about a recent study by two members of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, which concludes that workplace morale improves when employees use social media on their smartphones at work.
On MLK Day, with a few of my co-workers and my four-year-old son, I performed community service. We went to a local center and spent a few hours making peanut butter sandwiches to feed the homeless.
Actually, we spent a half-hour or so making sandwiches. Most of us spent the remainder of the time continuing to make sandwiches, while my son ate peanut butter.
Win-win.