EMPL O Y E E ' S R IG HT S The NLRB interprets and enforces the statute, and is charged
with protecting the rights of most private-sector employees to join together, with or without a union, to improve their wages and working conditions. The overwhelming majority of cases brought before the NLRB,
and enforcement actions taken by the general counsel of the board, involve alleged unfair labor practices by employers, Nagle said. "And it has always been so." He estimated that 80 percent or more of all unfair labor practice charges brought to the board are filed by unions or employees against management. The NLRB in June launched a public Web page that describes
the rights of employees to act together for their mutual aid and protection, whether they are in a union or not. The Web page (nlrb.gov/concerted-activity) describes recent
cases involving "protected concerted activity"—a principle of the NLRA that every employer should be familiar with, Nagle said. The cases described on the website include one in which a group
of co-workers was fired after discussing their grievances with a newspaper reporter, and another, in 2011, in which an employee was fired after posting work-related grievances on Facebook. "Some cases were quickly settled after charges were filed,
while others progressed to a board decision or to federal appellate courts," the board said in a statement announcing the launch of
the new website. "They were selected to show a variety of situa- tions, but they have in common a finding at some point in the NLRB process that the activity that the employees undertook was protected under federal labor law." The board noted that the right to engage in certain types of
concerted activity was written into the original 1935 National Labor Relations Act's Section 7, which states that: "Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organiza- tions, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, and shall also have the right to refrain from any or all such activities." That right has been upheld in numerous decisions by appellate
courts and by the U.S. Supreme Court over the years, the board noted, adding that non-union concerted activity accounts for more than 5 percent of the agency's recent caseload. When the NLRB's general counsel authorized a complaint
against an employer because the employer acted against an employee who complained on Facebook about a supervisor, the decision was like "the shot heard round the world" for the labor management community, Nagle said. The "groundbreaking" view of the board's general counsel is that social media "is just that," Nagle observed. "It's just a different
www.fueloilnews.com | FUEL OIL NEWS | OCTOBER 2012 25
