Last week, before the Memorial Day weekend, Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber signed into law this bill, which prohibits employers from requiring or requesting that employees or applicants for employment: Provide access to personal social media accounts, Add employers to social media contact lists, or Allow employers to view an employee’s…
Articles Posted in Social Media and the Workplace
Employee posts “FIRE ME…Make my day…” on Facebook. And guess what?
Yep. And not even the Associate General Counsel at the National Labor Relations Board could save this employee. In Tasker Healthcare Group, d/b/a Skinsmart Dermatology, the Charging Party — and nine other people (of whom seven were current employees) participated in a private group message on Facebook. During that sesh, the Charging…
Washington is the 9th state with a social media workplace privacy law
Or as I like to refer to it, an excuse to play Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Alice in Chains on the blog. Here is a link to Washington’s new law. Up next for a new social media workplace privacy law should be New Jersey, where the Assembly recently gave its…
Colorado now has a social media workplace privacy law too
Over the weekend, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper signed a bill making Colorado the eighth state to have a social media workplace privacy law. (The others are MD, IL, CA, MI, UT, NM, and AR). You can view a copy of the new CO law here. The new law places three…
Court orders re-hiring a teacher who wished her students a watery death
By now, the whole teacher blasting her job on Facebook is like death and taxes to me. I can’t a go a week or so without reading about a teacher posting photos of duct-taped students or a teacher wishing that her “devils spawn” students would drown in the ocean. Well,…
NJ Gov. Christie vetoes proposed workplace social media law
You see, employment-law dorks like me use tools like these to monitor the status of pending employment-law-related bills. And, yesterday, I got a hit informing me that, on Monday, Governor Christie conditionally vetoed this proposed NJ bill, which would prohibit employers from requiring employees and candidates for disclosing online usernames…
Fact or Fiction: It’s ok to fire an employee for pro-union Facebook posts to NON-employees
That’s right folks. It’s time for another edition of “Fact or Fiction” a/k/a “Quick Answers to Quick Questions” a/k/a QATQQ f/k/a “I don’t feel like writing a long blog post.” I’ll set it up for you: You run a non-union company called RH Chili Peppers. However, one of your employees,…
Wooooo pig sooie! Arkansas gets a workplace social media privacy law
I don’t know much about Arkansas. My knowledge consists of Gennifer Flowers, Wal-Mart, and this handy-dandy iPhone app for harvesting deer. I also hear that the official state beverage is milk. How about that? But now I know one more thing: Arkansas has a new social media privacy law, which…
Congress blocks proposed ban on requests for employee social media passwords
Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, better known as CISPA. CISPA provides for the sharing of certain cyber threat intelligence and cyber threat information between the intelligence community and cybersecurity entities, and for other purposes. However, the majority vote was not…
SURVEY: Should you friend your boss on Facebook?
When I first began drafting social media policies and offering social media training for clients, I preached that friending the boss was a bad idea. The lawyer in me was concerned for two reasons: (1) Facebook’s informality would facilitate behavior from a supervisor that a company would not otherwise tolerate…