There is no one-stop shopping law for firings related to social media;
but the best place to start is with the National Labor Relations Board because
they are dealing with these terminations more than anyone else.
Summary of two key cases:
Last week, the NLRB said that some tweets were not protected
by the law. The NLRB said that Chipotle Mexican Grill did not break the law
when it demanded an employee delete tweets criticizing the company for charging
extra for guacamole and using "cheap labor." But Chipotle did break
the law when it based its termination of the same employee for circulating a
petition claiming employees at his Pennsylvania restaurant were denied rest
breaks.
Bottom line: The board said the Denver-based company's
social media policy, which says employees "may not make disparaging,
false, misleading, harassing or discriminatory statements" about Chipotle,
was not too broad. "The tweet (about guacamole) appears unrelated to
employees' terms and conditions of employment, and thus was not for the purpose
of mutual aid or protection," the board wrote in a footnote in its brief
ruling.
But its policy that bans employees from circulating a
petition [not a Twitter issue] was illegally used to fire this employee.
In 2015, the NLRB ruled that an employee cannot be fired for
a Facebook post calling her boss an “asshole.” A federal appeals court upheld
the ruling. The case is Chipotle Services LLC, National Labor Relations Board.
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