What to put on personal Facebook pages has been a charged topic for years. Scenes of drunken debauchery are almost universally viewed as taboo—(and after many years I was convinced to replace my profile photo of a back-flip gone horribly wrong during a college diving meet)—but what about workplace complaints?
According to an article in the Huffington Post, "The federal agency tasked with enforcing labor law has been fielding complaints from workers across the country who have been fired or disciplined for their work-related indiscretions on Facebook."
In one case cited in the article, an employee at a Connecticut ambulance company was fired for criticizing her boss on Facebook.
"'Love how the company allows a 17 to become a supervisor,' Dawnmarie Souza wrote, '17' being an insider's term for a psychiatric patient. The company, American Medical Response, had a policy that forbid employees from criticizing the company online. The NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] took up Souza's complaint, arguing in part that such a policy was too broad.
In the end, the NLRB declined declined to issue complaints on Souza's behalf, saying her punishment was legitimate.
Read the full story on the Huffington Post here.
What do you think, should managers be able to fire employees based on what they write on Facebook? Is workplace angst one expresses on Facebook the same as griping with co-workers around the water cooler...or is it crossing an entirely different line? Please weigh in below.
