I recently received a call from a client, a director of human resources for a hospital, who expressed deep concern, if not outright panic, over what he understood to be a sweeping new ban imposed by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against employers’ attempts to limit employees’ comments about work-related issues on social media sites.
He envisioned a nightmare scenario of employees on Facebook and Twitter freely revealing confidential and proprietary information about the hospital, workers discussing patients’ private medical information and employees using their Facebook pages as an open forum where they collectively harassed and belittled co-workers and supervisors with impunity, all with employers lacking the ability to exercise control over the content of such employee postings.
