Employee Rights Poster to Join the Union Ruled Invalid!
Last week the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued its ruling in a case brought by several employer groups seeking to challenge the legality of the NLRB rule requiring employers to post an employee rights poster informing employees of their rights under the NLRA to unionize, among other things. As employers will recall, the NLRB had postponed the effective date of the posting requirement several times pending various court challenges to the legality of the required poster. The NLRB then gained a victory before a District of Columbia district court, which held that the poster was lawful. Employer groups appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which temporarily enjoined the NLRB from implementing the posting requirement until a ruling on the merits of the appeal. Last week, the Court of Appeals reversed the district court decision and held that the NLRB’s posting rule violated employers’ free speech rights and was, therefore, unlawful. For now, employers remain free of any obligation to post the NLRB employee rights poster.
The “Employee Tricked Me Into Firing Her” Defense
The NLRB continues to issue decisions about whether an employer can lawfully terminate employees based on social media activity, and whether workplace policies violate the law protecting employees’ rights to engage in protected concerted activity. However, last week’s decision in In re Design Technology Group, LLC had an interesting twist.
Three sales employees were discussing several work-related issues in person, and their discussion continued on Facebook. Among the complaints made were about how the store manager treated them and other store employees. The store manager later learned about the complaints, and subsequently fired the employees. At the hearing, the employer made much about the fact that the employees were “giggling and smiling” at the termination meeting, and that Facebook posts after the meeting suggested that the employees were happy to have been fired, and perhaps even set up the circumstances in order to get fired and sue the employer.
Adopting the ALJ’s decision, the NLRB was not persuaded by the employer’s defense:
The judge correctly rejected the Respondent’s ‘discharge conspiracy’ theory. The Respondent contends that the Facebook postings were not protected because the employees had ‘no honest and reasonable belief’ that the purpose of their conduct was for the mutual aid and protection of employees’ and that instead, the employees ‘schemed to entrap their employer into firing them.’ The judge found the conspiracy theory to be ‘nonsensical,’ and we agree. There is no credible evidence that the employees’ actions were undertaken to entrap the Respondent into committing an unfair labor practice. But even if the employees were acting in the hope that they would be discharged for their Facebook postings, the Respondent failed to establish that the employees’ actions were not protected by the Act.
Employer Take Away: What should you as an employer take away from this development?
The NLRB says that entrapment is not a valid defense to a proposed violation of employees’ rights to engage in protected concerted activity. That is, if the employees did engage in protected concerted activity under the National Labor Relations Act, it does not matter if they did so for the purpose of getting fired.
It remains to be seen whether an “entrapment”-like defense to these cases will gain any traction in later cases. For the time being, it would behoove you to focus less on the motives of the employees engaging in certain conduct, and more on whether the conduct itself is protected, before deciding to take some adverse action because of the conduct.
