NLRB Report on social media

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) recently issued a report (24 page pdf) detailing how the NLRB has been addressing cases involving employees' use of social media and .employers' policies about the use of social media. The report uses 14 cases to illustrate how the NLRB General Counsel’s office determines that use of social media qualifies as protected activity, and when the contents of an employer’s social media policy can give rise to liability under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), even if the employees are not represented by a union. In 4 cases involving employees’ Facebook use,  the employees were engaged in "protected concerted activity" because they were discussing terms and conditions of employment with fellow employees. In five other cases involving Facebook or Twitter posts, the NLRB found that the activity was not protected.
In one case, it was determined that a union engaged in unlawful coercive conduct when it videotaped interviews with employees at a nonunion jobsite about their immigration status and then posted an edited version on YouTube and the Local Union’s Facebook page. In five cases, some provisions of employers’ social media policies were found to be unlawfully overly-broad; in one case the employer policy lawfully restricted use of social media.