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Employers can ban employees from using work email for personal purposes, including union organizing, the National Labor Relations Board ruled on Monday.
[...] Federal labor law protects employees' right to organize without interference from employers. That includes a limited right to engage in organizing activities in the workplace.
[...] Labor-rights advocates have long argued that this principle should extend to workplace email systems. They point out that email can be one of the most efficient ways for workers to contact one another and discuss workplace issues. And they note that the costs to employers from added email use is negligible.
[...] The latest ruling focuses on the casino operator Caesars Entertainment, which has broad policies prohibiting employees from using its email systems for personal use.
[...] The law merely requires that workers be given some reasonable means of communicating with one another, the board held. The law already protects the rights of workers to communicate via face-to-face conversations and the distribution of literature. That gives workers sufficient opportunities to communicate to satisfy the requirements of labor law, the board ruled.
[...] The board's lone Democrat, Lauren McFerran, dissented from the ruling, arguing that the majority had misinterpreted the law. She argued that property rights weren't relevant to the case because Caesars had already granted its employees access to the email system.
Additional Source:
Shortly after Google staffers engaged in the largest mass walkout at any tech firm in the United States, the company quietly lobbied the National Labor Relations Board in the hopes it would roll back a decision that safeguarded the only way protesters were able to organize that action as quickly as they did: email. Unfortunately, Google's hope has become a reality.
https://gizmodo.com/disastrous-nlrb-ruling-adds-another-hurdle-for-tech-wor-1840491764
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19 2019, @07:32AM (5 children)
people might want to do it on the employer's hardware is so that it would be documented in the case of a wrongful termination during labor organization. If you're doing it via email or web forums it would be much harder to subpoenia for forensic evidence that the employer had a spy/mole in the forum and used them to fire organizers or sympathetic employees to terminate an attempt at unionization.
Personally I think anyone working at google deserves what they get and if people really cared about the tech industry more people would be organizing as decentralized networks of small companies to destroy these behemoths by the death of a thousand cuts with pooling of resources for expenses the individual companies couldn't make, like fabbing custom hardware or putting together cloud infrastructure.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19 2019, @12:14PM (1 child)
if people really cared about the tech industry more people would be organizing as decentralized networks of small companies to destroy these behemoths by the death of a thousand cuts with pooling of resources for expenses the individual companies couldn't make, like fabbing custom hardware or putting together cloud infrastructure.
I agree with your ideals and respect your enthusiasm, but decentralized networks of small companies will never dethrone the industry giants. If there's even a hint that a company will disrupt a giant, it will be purchased and have its ideas burned to ashes or incorporated into one of the existing behemoths. Other upstarts will find themselves buried in patent, trademark, and copyright lawsuits until the legal fees drive them out of business. This battle for privacy and freedom will never be won in the capitalist market, our enemies have literally hundreds of billions of dollars at their disposal and our distributed, decentralized band of freedom fighters haven't liberated even 0.1% of the general population.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @08:01PM
this will "go hot" one day soon.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 19 2019, @12:35PM (2 children)
"Spy/mole"? So you acknowledge that there is reason to keep these discussions hidden from the employer. In that light, why would you ever want to put those discussions on an employer controlled forum? They don't need a spy/mole. They just need to read the emails legally. And if the reason to hold secret conversations on non-secret channels is to generate a pretext for liability for the employer, well that is likely a firing offense.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19 2019, @12:50PM (1 child)
Of course - you're fired for a protected activity that you should have known the company would illegally retaliate against!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday December 19 2019, @12:58PM