Feds: Employers allowed to block e-mails related to labor union activity RAW STORY

Published: Saturday December 22, 2007



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Print This Email This Employers have the right to bar employees from sending union-related E-mails using company servers, the New York Times reports. On Friday, the National Labor Relations Board ruled 3-2 that an employer, using internal company policy, has the right to classify a union-related communication as a "non-job-related solicitation." The two dissenting board members noted that E-mail has become a major form of communication in the workplace, and disagreed with the majority's assertion that a company's "property rights" trump an employee's right to organize and discuss workplace-related issues with other workers. # EXCERPTS: The ruling involved The Register-Guard, a newspaper in Eugene, Ore., and e-mail messages sent in 2000 by Susi Prozanski, a newspaper employee who was president of the Newspaper Guilds unit there. She sent an e-mail message about a union rally and two others urging employees to wear green to show support for the unions position in contract negotiations. During the years that this case was pending, many companies were uncertain whether they could bar union-related e-mail. But the labor boards decision gives companies nationwide the green light to flatly prohibit union-related e-mails as part of an overall non-solicitation policy. Anyone with e-mail knows that this is how employees communicate with each other in todays workplace, said Jonathan Hiatt, general counsel for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Outrageously in allowing employers to ban such communications for union purposes, the Bush labor board has again struck at the heart of what the nations labor laws were intended to protect  the right of employees to discuss working conditions and other matters of mutual concern. # The entire New York Times article can be read HERE.



