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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Labor board: Company email OK for labor organizing

Tom Raum Associated Press

WASHINGTON – In a victory for unions, the National Labor Relations Board ruled Thursday that employees can use their company email accounts for union organizing and other workplace-related purposes, if they do it on their own time.

Once an employer gives an employee access to the company email system, then the business cannot restrict what the employee emails, so long as it is generally workplace-related and isn’t during working hours, the NLRB ruled. The NLRB is a government agency that investigates unfair labor practices.

The ruling said that “the use of email as a common form of workplace communications has expanded dramatically in recent years.” The ruling could give unions a powerful organizing weapon.

The three Democrats on the five member board voted “yes,” while the two Republicans abstained.

The ruling reverses a 2007 board decision that employees don’t have a legal right to use their employers’ email for union activity or discussing wages or other workplace issues.

It also upholds an opinion by the NLRB’s general counsel, who suggested that workers had a presumed statutory right to use company email to discuss a range of workplace issues – so long as they did it on their own time and unless an employer could demonstrate that doing so would hurt productivity or office discipline.

The decision was a victory for the Communications Workers of America, which brought the case in 2012 after it was unable to use company email to organize employees of Purple Communications in Rocklin, California, a company that provides interpreting services for the deaf and hard of hearing. The union contended that prohibiting Purple workers from using company email to organize interfered with its efforts.

Bernie Lunzer, president of the Newspaper Guild-CWA and a vice president of the Communications Workers of America, called the ruling “a big victory for workers in general. Basically the board is saying that there is a wide berth for that kind of discussion, that it can’t be prohibited. There are limitations. This is something where people are supposed to be doing this not on the work time. And they can’t be obstructive to the productivity of the company. But the flat-out prohibition of any discussion of forming a union or acting collectively, basically the board has said that’s fair.”

In Thursday’s ruling, the board majority said the earlier decision “was clearly incorrect. The consequences of that error are too serious to permit it to stand.”

“By focusing too much on employers’ property rights and too little on the importance of email as a means of workplace communication, the Board (in its earlier ruling) failed to adequately protect employees’ rights … and abdicated its responsibility ‘to adapt the Act to the changing patterns of industrial life.’ ”