National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)

In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act to oversee and establish basic rights for workers in the private sector. This foundational law created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) which awards employees with legal rights to organize and collectively bargain for better work conditions and wages (Snell, Morris and Bohlander, 2015, p. 536). The board also grants workers the right to engage in “concerted activity” when desiring to address employer issues unionized or not. Though no one in 1935 could have imagined the complexities of social communication in the 21st century, the rise of social media is altering the way that the NLRB is having to define what protection employees have in regards to discussions

Corporations should under no circumstance gain fraudulent access to employee pages which violates the Stored Communications Act, a law that prohibits the unlawful access to an electronic communication device. Violations can be punishable by penalties and even imprisonment, especially if the access was determined to be done with malicious intent to destroy or damage (Title 18, U.S. Code 2701). Some state and local laws also forbid employees asking workers for the username and password information or requiring employees to “friend” the company in order to gain access to page information (O’Connor, 2015). Of course exceptions are made for company-sponsored sites because employers do have the right to monitor these activities. Employees should have full understanding that there is limited privacy and all comments are monitored and can be taken into consideration (Ornstein,

HR managers must stay abreast of NLRB decisions to determine how social media cases are handled. Previous decisions can give insight to what actions are permissible. For example, in October of 2010, NLRB cited a complaint against the American Medical Response of Connecticut for firing an employee for making negative remarks against her supervisor (Stoler, 2010). The employee’s response on social media was determined to be protected; therefore, her termination was illegal. For this reason, policy language regarding the use of social media should be specific and void of broad language that could be disputed and challenged (Dewey, 2014). Policies also cannot restrict employees on what can be said on their personal social media sites, even if their comments are negative and/or suggest an undesirable observation about the work environment or a particular person (Dewey, 2014). Ornstein also suggests that policies be made in conjunction with federal, state and local laws and any monitoring of employee activity should involve particular interests and should not impede on employee’s rights as no policy can dictate what an employee chooses to engage in when “off-duty” (Ornstein,