Some Nasty Worker Talk Gets NLRB Okay

The right to workplace-related “concerted action,” as enshrined in the National Labor Relations Act, is being broadly interpreted by the National Labor Relations Board, says a post by Littler attorneys Alan Model and Jason Silver. “The NLRB continues to condone bad behavior as ‘protected behavior’ so long as it is tangentially related to concerted activity under the Act,” they write, and they point to a couple of recent examples. The weightier of the two is probably a recent Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that came down on the side of a poster campaign by Jimmy John’s workers who were trying to get the restaurant to change its sick leave policy. The posters hinted more than broadly  (“Shoot, We Can’t Even Call in Sick”) there might some food health issues involved. In another case, the NLRB upheld the right of a server, writing on his face book page, to call the boss a nasty MF.