Back in September, I joked that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was on the verge of disbanding.
(Ok, maybe it wasn’t “ha! ha!” funny. Just work with me here, will ya?)
How does this blog post relate to gridlock in Paris and a red circle? Hella-existential, I’d say…
What is this? A broken record?
Yesterday, I blogged about a recent NY appellate decision in which the court held that an employee who had sued her employer would have have to turn over her Facebook postings that related to the case.
Today, we head south down 95, and then west to Franklin County, PA, where a state court judge recently explained, in far greater detail than in the NY opinion, why employees have no reasonable expectation of privacy in their Facebook posts. (Not coincidentally, everything is done better in PA than in NY. Inferiority complex, much? Yep.)
I’ll break it down — the decision, not my complex — after the jump…
What a whirlwind 12 months it’s been for Edith Employee! Or, should I say, Edith “former” Employee?
Last year, she was an employee for ABC Company. This year, she is suing ABC for sexual harassment. Among other things, Edith claims damages for physical and psychological injuries, including the inability to work, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and the loss of enjoyment of life.
And, right now, we find the parties entrenched in some scorched-earth discovery. ABC Company has just requested “all of plaintiff’s Facebook records compiled after the incidents alleged in the complaint, including any records previously deleted or archived.”
Can ABC do that? Will Edith have to turn over all of these records? The answer follows after the jump..
How many claims were filed? And how much money did the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recover for individuals? Find out after the jump…
I’m in Las Vegas.
So, for today, Jane Smith has control of the The Employer handbook. Jane is a freelance writer and blogger. She writes about free background checks for Backgroundcheck.org. After the jump, check out her top 5 reasons employers give employees the boot. Questions and comments can be sent to: janesmth161@gmail.com
I read this on ZDnet yesterday:
Administrative Law Judge Ellen Bass has ruled Jennifer O’Brien, a first-grade teacher at School 21 in Paterson, New Jersey, should lose her tenured job, because of a Facebook comment she made about her students. O’Brien has been on administrative leave since March, which is when she posted her status update saying “I’m not a teacher — I’m a warden for future criminals!” She claimed she wrote it out of exasperation after several students disrupted her lessons, one pupil hit her, and another stole money from her.
Bass said O’Brien “demonstrated a complete lack of sensitivity to the world in which her students live” and called her conduct “inexcusable.”
Do you have a unionized workforce? If you have a social-media policy, it should not expressly restrict employees’ rights to discuss terms and conditions of employment. Otherwise, you may be violating the National Labor Relations Act.
And to those non-union employers who have social-media policies, don’t think for a second that you have carte blanche to control what employees say and do online. The National Labor Relations Act covers you as well.
So how can you draft a social-media policy that won’t run afoul of the National Labor Relations Act? Find out after the jump…
Cisco just completed this study, which shows just how much social media, device freedom, and mobile work means to the next generation. Thinking about banning social media in the workplace? Before you flip the kill switch, read the rest of this post after the jump…
When Krysten Overly, a financial advisor at a bank, told her male boss that she was resigning, Overly claims that he grabbed Overly’s arm to push her out the door. And as Overly left her boss’s office, he yelled, “Good riddance, bitch!”
What a jerk! But, as a matter of law, did he contribute to a sexually harassing hostile work environment? Find out after the jump…
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If you have 50 or more employees, you must abide by the Family and Medical Leave Act. The FMLA affords up to 12 workweeks of leave in a 12-month period, among other things, to care for a parent with a serious health condition. But let’s say that you have dropped the ball and failed to provide your employees with:
- information or notice explaining the provisions of the FMLA,
- information regarding how to file complaints for violations of the FMLA, and
- FMLA information in “any written guidance to employees concerning employee benefits or leave rights, such as in an employee handbook.”
Let’s even assume that one of your employees takes leave that would otherwise qualify under the FMLA, but you fail to tell that employee that the FMLA covers the leave.
Have you interfered with your employee’s FMLA rights? I’ll spin some Alice in Chains and drop the 411 after the jump…
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