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
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 Party started mouthing off about his employer, saying, “They [the Employer] are full of shit … They seem to be staying away from me, you know I don’t bite my [tongue] anymore, FUCK…FIRE ME….Make my day…”
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 unanimous approval to the Governor’s conditional veto of recent legislation.
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 restrictions on employers with respect to access of employee and applicant social media accounts:
- No requests for social media user names and passwords;
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, here’s a new one.
Last week, a court ordered the NY school to re-hire the teacher it had fired for wanting to send her hellish kids to their watery graves.
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 and passwords.
Savador Rizzo at The Star-Ledger summarized Gov. Christie’s reasons for vetoing the bill here:
Christie said that he supports safeguarding “the privacy of job candidates and employees from overly aggressive invasions by employers” but that he wants to see stronger protections for businesses. For example, the governor said aggrieved workers should go to the state labor commissioner with their complaints instead of being able to file lawsuits in state court.
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, Disgruntled Donny, has been trying to get his co-workers to help unionize the workplace. Thus far, he has been unsuccessful. So, DD takes to Facebook and posts a message bashing the wages and benefits at RH Chili Peppers on a Facebook page called, “Peter Picked a Peck,” a Facebook page that DD “likes.” PPaP is frequented by employees, like DD, who work in the chili pepper industry, albeit at other chili pepper companies in the city.
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 prohibits an employer from requiring or requesting that a current or prospective employee do any of the following:
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 without a speed bump, according to this report from Josh Wolford at WebProNews:
Colorado Democrat Ed Perlmutter attempted to tack on a provision to CISPA that would make it illegal for employers to require prospective employees to hand over their social media passwords as a condition of acquiring or keeping a job.
Perlmutter’s amendment was voted down 224-189.
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 in the workplace; (2) if a supervisor knew about, but failed to report, employee actions on Facebook that would violate an anti-harassment policy, the company could lose a valuable discrimination defense.
What do non-lawyers have to say about friending the boss on Facebook? Find out after the jump…
The Employer Handbook Blog