Weinrib and Stone on the "Thorny Issues" of Employment-Related Speech on Social Media
Construction Firms Learn To Avoid Pitfalls of Social Media
The disparagement of a company’s product is not given protected status, nor is what the law calls personal griping, says Laura Weinrib, assistant professor of law and the Herbert and Marjorie Fried Teaching Scholar at the University of Chicago Law School. However, the line between such comments and protected expression often can be blurry, Weinrib cautions. For example, criticism of a product manufactured by nonunion workers could be construed “as sufficiently connected to a labor dispute that it would be legally protected,” she notes.
Weinrib’s colleague, Geoffrey R. Stone, the Edward H. Levy Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Law School and a nationally recognized expert on the First Amendment, observes that, outside the protections of the National Labor Relations Act, employees don’t automatically enjoy unfettered free speech. Indeed, the First Amendment’s free-speech requirements apply only to the government and not to private employers, Stone says. In particular, private companies can use the employment contract to limit what employees can say, subject to regulation under state contract laws, he adds.
Read more at Engineering News-Record