Last month I wrote about an NLRB complaint against a Connecticut ambulance company, American Medical Response (AMR), for wrongful termination of an employee who had complained on Facebook about her supervisors and the company. The NLRB had begun proceedings against AMR for violating the employee’s rights under the National Labor Relations Act, specifically rights to take “concerted activity” related to working conditions.
The New York Times reported yesterday that the company had reached a settlement with the NLRB. In particular, The Times reported that the company agreed to modify its workplace policies “to ensure that they do not improperly restrict employees from discussing wages, hours and working conditions with co-workers and others while not at work, and that they would not discipline or discharge employees for engaging in such discussions.”
It is believed that this case was the first of its kind, where the NLRB took action against an employer related to an employee’s comments and conduct on a social media site like Facebook.
According to the San Jose Business Journal, the company reached a separate private settlement with the fired employee, the terms of which were not disclosed by the NLRB, the company or the employee.
Interestingly, while the case obviously did not get to a full precedent-setting decision, a publicly-acknowledged condition to the settlement was the company’s acknowledgment that outside discussions of work conditions could not be acted upon detrimentally by the company. And without explicitly stating so, these outside discussions obviously included facebook and other social media outlets.
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