Week 5 Final Project

Final Project Week 5

Keli Brooke Smith

South University

In 2007 the National Labor Relations Board made a decisions that an employer was not in the wrong for having a policy that prohibited the use of company email for personal use which included the solicitation for people to join the union. In the past workers have not been allowed to use other forms of a companies communications systems to discuss and solicit for the union. This was an important topic to determine whether email would be included in such communications.

All of the uproar stemmed from an employee using her company email on a break to send other employees clarifying information from a union rally. The National Labor Relations Board had to decide whether or not this should be allowed under the National Labor Relations Act. The National Labor Relations Board made the decision that this violated the National Labor Relations Act and therefore should be stopped.

The case ended up going to the court of appeals because other non-work related solicitations were being done through the email and the union members thought they should be able to use the system the same way. The court decided that because the email was not a solicitation for the union but merely a clarification on facts that it was not a violation of the policy to not solicit for unions on business time using business equipment.

The decision has a major impact on business monitoring email because one cannot say that one type of solicitation is proper where as another is not. One would have to stop all personal communications or not stop them at all to enforce such rules that were not discriminatory. It is almost impossible to regulate all email communications within a business and almost crazy to try to do so. It would take up so much time to monitor all email communication that one would not be able to accomplish much else....