Concerted activity and social networking - Research Paper Example

Download file to see previous pages The same rationale was applied in the case of Crawford v. Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County of 2009. In this particular case the court held that an employee might not be retaliated against for taking part in an organization’s investigation of a colleague’s complaint (Hogan, 2011). The courts even went on to award a $1.5 million to the staff member who had filed the lawsuit. Even the judge in the Thompson v. North American Stainless case appeared to concur with both judgments when he allowed for a man to sue for retaliatory for being fired just shortly after her spouse filed a sex discrimination charge against her employer who was also his spouse’s employer (Sprague, 2012). It was this kind of reasoning that informed the enactment of the National Labor Relation Act (NLRA) or the law governing the relationship between unions and organization’s management. ...
Still the same line of reasoning held sway if a number of rulings that have been made in connection to disparaging remarks made in social media site on employers is anything to go by. The explosion of these social networking has brought about new employment-related issues to the organizations that companies should worry about very much. This explain why new issues like; online harassment and particularly in any of the social sites, theft of company’s secrets by bloggers and ranting from some quarters about YouTube, MySpace, twitter and any other social networking sites; have become common theme is employments seminars. Just as employers are trying to come up with ways and means of dealing with these challenges, a new debate has been kicked-off interrogating the question of whether internet postings constitutes Concerted Activity under the definition of National Labor Relation Act (NLRA).In this regard, NLRA is a law that was enacted in 1935 in order to protect the employees’ rights in concerted activity (Smith, 2011). Although the law does not explicitly define what a concerted activity is, case laws have offered what can be looked on as the range of activities that make up concerted activities. These activities include; hour, wages, safety, working condition and also benefits. According to NLRA, these are the activities that should not be prohibited by any policy that a company might decide to implement. As a law, NLRA is the reference point of HR professionals and organizations when it comes to dealing with employees’ social media activities, and particularly Section 7 which provides that “employees have a right to self-organization, to form, join, or even help labor ...Download file to see next pagesRead More