Employee rights need updating for digital age

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/business/s_568084.html

By Diane Stafford
McCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
Sunday, May 18, 2008


KANSAS CITY -- Two college students in California may force the National Labor Relations Board to enter the 21st century -- but don't get your hopes up soon. The presidential election season has put politics over expediency.

Once we get a new president, and the new president's appointments fill vacancies on the NLRB board, we may finally get a workplace-savvy ruling from the board about employee-organizing rights in the digital age.

A bit of background: The NLRB board made a neo-Luddite decision in December in a case known as Register-Guard when it failed to recognize that "remote" workers communicate with each other online. The decision in that case failed to recognize that in widely dispersed workplaces many co-workers never meet in break rooms or by bulletin boards, the traditional gathering spots for employee communication.

On the heels of Register-Guard , here's the new case to watch:

Sarah Doolittle and Austin Garrido, two California Polytechnic State University students worked part time for ULoop.com, an online marketplace for college students on campuses. Early this year, they noticed that their paychecks were a lot smaller than expected and, upon inquiry, learned that their pay rate had been cut without notice from $10 an hour to $8 an hour.

They posted a message on the ULoop-sponsored message board set up for employees on dispersed campuses, saying that they wanted to form a union. Twenty minutes later, they said, they were fired, ostensibly for using the company's site for union-organizing activities. ULoop isn't commenting.

FULL story at link.

[midnight]

1. Is that legal?

[Earth Bound Misfit]

2. Is it Legal? With our CRIMINALLY WEAK Labor laws, it really doesn't matter

Source: American Rights At Work

Unionbusting 2.0
Written by Erin Johansson
May 05, 2008

As more jobs stray from the traditional 9 to 5 office scenario, employee discussions over lunch in the break room are becoming a thing of the past. Email has in many ways filled that gap, enabling employees to communicate about issues of common interest.

But at Uloop, a social networking site aimed at college students, workers were fired 20 minutes after they first discussed forming a union on the company’s online message boards.

The employees filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board, claiming that their termination was illegal because their communication was protected by labor law. This charge will likely be a test of the precedent-setting Register-Guard case, where the Labor Board denied protections for employees who email each other about union-related issues, failing to recognize technological advancements in workplace communication.

Because its employees work on campuses across the country, Uloop set up an online message board so they could communicate with each other. According to Valleywag, when Uloop employees Austin Garrido and Sarah Doolittle realized that their pay was cut without warning, they raised the prospect of organizing a union on the message board. The company responded by firing the two and removing their posts—but only after they called each employee who commented on the thread.

If the employees’ communication had taken place in person, the NLRB would likely find the company’s retaliation illegal. Yet in the Register-Guard decision, the Republican majority gave employers “virtually unlimited discretion” to deny employees their free speech rights through email, as described by the dissenting opinion.

The NLRB should be helping a new generation of workers like Garrido and Doolittle—who see unions as a way to advance their rights—to employ the latest technology to organize their coworkers. If the agency throws out their case in response to Register Guard, we’ll see that there is nothing virtual about the damage done to workers’ rights by the Bush Board.


Austin Garrido and Sarah Doolittle