If employers aren’t more careful about how they handle their employee’ use of social media like Facebook, they may find themselves keeping plaintiffs’ attorneys busy with complaints and litigation that can drain time and resources from the most well-intentioned company.
Like every technological advance, social media is a two-edged sword. It can be used for good, or used for bad. And more employers are finding out, the hard way, unfortunately, the difference between the two.
For example, the Wall St. Journal reported that this week a National Labor Relations Board judge will consider whether a medical-transportation company illegally fired an employee after she criticized her boss on Facebook. It’s the NLRB’s first complaint linked to social media, the Journal said.
“The intersection of social media and the office is a potential minefield,” said Philip L. Gordon, Denver-based chairman of the privacy and data-protection practice group at law firm Littler & Mendelson PC. Gordon cited “reputational risks” to an employer even if it prevails in such actions.
Here are other examples of actions against employers that got tripped up over social media:
- workers sued a restaurant company when they were dismissed after managers accessed a private Myspace page the employees set up to talk about work;
- Cisco Systems Inc. has settled two lawsuit stemming from comments by an anonymous blogger (a Cisco attorney) about two Texas lawyers and their patent-infringement suit against Cisco;
- former Georgia high school teacher Ashley Payne sued the local school district in Barrow County, claiming she was forced to resign over Facebook photographs that showed her holding a glass of wine during a European vacation.
And in a case that has perhaps received the most notoriety in this field, two restaurant workers sued their employer in federal court in New Jersey after they were fired for allegedly violating the company’s core values.
The violation in question? The workers had created a password-protected Myspace page meant for employees but not managers. A jury found that the employer, Hillstone Restaurant Group, violated the federal Stored Communications Act and the equivalent New Jersey law, and awarded them $3,403 in back pay and $13,600 in punitive damages. The parties reached a settlement before the restaurant appealed.
But who wants to be sucked into that maw? The moral of the story; make sure you have a social media policy that outlines what is and isn’t appropriate, and then train employees (especially supervisors) on the policy.
