NLRB: Employers May Restrict Employees’ Use of Email and Other IT Systems

Our colleague Adam S. Forman at Epstein Becker Green has recently published a post on the Management Memo blog that will be of interest to our readers in the retail industry: “NLRB Reverses Purple Communications – Holds Employer May Restrict Employees’ Use of Email and Other Information Technology Systems.”

Following is an excerpt:

On December 17, 2019, the National Labor Relations Board (“Board”) ruled that an employer’s rule prohibiting use of its email system for nonbusiness purposes did not violate employees’ rights under the National Labor Relations Act. The 3-1 decision in Caesars Entertainment Corp d/b/a Rio All-Suites Hotel and Casino, NLRB Case No. 28-CA-060841, overturns the Board’s 2014 decision in Purple Communications, which held that work rules prohibiting employees from using employer-provided email systems for union activity were presumptively invalid.

According to the Caesars Entertainment majority, employees “do not have a statutory right to use employers’ email and other information-technology (IT) resources to engage in non-work-related communications.”  “Rather, employers have the right to control the use of their equipment, including their email and other IT systems, and they may lawfully exercise that right to restrict the uses to which those systems are put, provided that in doing so, they do not discriminate” against activities protected by Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, such as discussing wages, hours, and terms and conditions of employment. …

Read the full article here.