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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
Previous Stories:
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/12/17/1948215
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/12/04/0029250
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/11/26/1411249
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday December 19 2019, @05:09AM (3 children)
Organize on Whatsapp...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by NateMich on Thursday December 19 2019, @05:29AM (1 child)
That should be really effective in the US...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19 2019, @12:07PM
Boss wonders where all his H1B Indians went today...
(Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Thursday December 19 2019, @08:00PM
More accurately because all this stuff is out of date by the time the lawyers are done with it, my guess is in a decade we will be seeing Soylent stories about Livejournal ICQ and MySpace finally being banned for union organizing.
Oh and Yahooooooo Groups also banned in 2029, that being the site that was shut down and erased this last week.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Thursday December 19 2019, @05:49AM (11 children)
Let's be honest here -- using your employer's servers, over which your employer has complete root access, is stupid if you are trying to maintain any semblance of privacy and/or secrecy. Not using an employer's email makes it much harder for the employer to: A) read your email (*), B) know who is involved (and ripe for a pretextual firing), and C) know exactly what countermeasures would be most effective.
(*) Let's not pretend that anyone will be using GPG or similar, and those are using such technology, aren't the knuckle heads using company email in the first place.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 19 2019, @06:04AM (7 children)
Well, I'm wondering how much privacy and secrecy these people were aiming for. The NLRB already dictated that the substance of this popup were published inside of Google's workplaces. Everyone was privy to the contents of the message, and NLRB mandated that it be publicized conspicuously. No secrecy, here.
For private and secret communications, I'm pretty sure that every Google employee has a phone, and they certainly have access to email outside of Google. All they need do for secrecy (for certain values of secrecy) is to form a group at Reddit, Twitter, or, OMG Facebook. MySpace is still around, although I haven't looked at it in forever.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(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
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Thursday December 19 2019, @04:05PM
Well ideally they also should get a not Android phone. You can't ever be sure. In general, asking the opponent to keep your stuff is insane.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday December 19 2019, @08:02PM (2 children)
Why bother with GPG if your employer has root access or equiv on your hardware? About as silly as demanding the use of the corporate SSL cert to keep your union organizing private.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday December 20 2019, @11:38PM (1 child)
Why not store your private key on removable media? I've never tried that because I am the boss of my tiny little thing, but it would be better than storing it on computers your boss owns.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Sunday December 22 2019, @03:13PM
Then you end up with the traditional balance problem of do you trust a large consortium of mfgrs and browser authors and just buy off the shelf U2F hardware, or roll your own possibly correctly using plain old flash drives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_2nd_Factor [wikipedia.org]
There is an interesting in between solution where I read a detailed description of someone turning an arduino / teensy type board in to a U2F key. So you can trust your key... hope you can trust the browser software. Presumably a home compiled U2F application for an arduino would not have back doors.
Supposedly there's no master record of the keys burned into commercial devices from mfgrs. Supposedly. But if one existed then you could cut and paste it into an arduino emulating the U2F using existing arduino U2F code and away you go.
This also brings up the point that the easiest way to crack an arduino homemade U2F device would be the completely insecure machine and IDE that programmed it having the burned in key sitting there in plain text in the source code and on the drive and in memory etc. So to be serious you kinda need to program a homemade arduino U2F key then thermite the entire box especially the HD.
Hilariously the public arduino code, as I remember, used xor in some unwise way so another dude wrote an exploit to flip a single bit at a time of known plaintext and in about 256 rounds (or whatever) it could crack the key. So, as usual, doing crypto yourself is almost as dangerous as trusting the FBI/CIA/NSA/DIA. Choose your poison I guess.
(Score: 3, Touché) by SpockLogic on Thursday December 19 2019, @01:57PM (2 children)
It is rumored that The Google Code of Conduct* has been successfully amended to read
"Don't be evil.""Fuck the employees."*Senior Executive Edition, not for publication
Overreacting is one thing, sticking your head up your ass hoping the problem goes away is another - edIII
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19 2019, @03:59PM (1 child)
In other other news...
Trump got impeached.
No republican voted impeachment, it was all democrats. Remember that at the polls.
(Score: 4, Touché) by SpockLogic on Thursday December 19 2019, @08:17PM
Thanks for the reminder not to vote Republican.
Overreacting is one thing, sticking your head up your ass hoping the problem goes away is another - edIII
(Score: 4, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday December 19 2019, @02:19PM (3 children)
The right to organize wouldn't be the question here as I read it. It's the question of what resources may be used in trying to organize. Are leaflets OK? Assuming they are, that doesn't mean the employer has to let the employees use the company's paper and photocopier and printers to do so.
A more interesting question would be: If employees have personal cell phones, should they be allowed to use them on company time to check for messages about organization? Alternately: Would company policies prohibiting personal device use during work hours constitute interference and harassment with organizing?
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday December 19 2019, @07:33PM (2 children)
I think it is a question of the right to organise.
Corporations are generally against the idea, and have the influence to put as many roadblocks in place as they can.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday December 20 2019, @02:35AM (1 child)
How is it the employer's responsibility to help employees organize against them?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday December 22 2019, @03:50AM
How would they be helping?