Remember that one little bone that the National Labor Relations Board threw to employers on social media policies? The guidance was generally atrocious, but in the last memorandum of the Acting General Counsel a policy developed by Walmart was approved and attached.

I've suggested that employers use that Walmart policy as a go-by in developing their social media policies.

Well, now ...

This issue has been coming up a lot lately: What should an employer do when an employee claims that her co-workers' fragrances make her sick?

(I'm not being sexist here -- every time I've had it come up, it was a woman complaining about women's fragrances. For the record, men's fragrances can be annoying, too. When they're not completely irresistible.)

Allow me to specify what I mean by ...

Wow! This story has it all.

Bullying!

Chick-fil-A!

Social media!

Was this guy's YouTube post "protected concerted activity"? You decide.

Adam Smith (no relation to that "invisible hand" guy), chief financial officer of biotech company Vante, went to a drive-through at a Tucson Chick-fil-A on Wednesday morning, ordered a free water, confronted the drive-through girl* about ...

"Love means having to say you're sorry." Wait a minute. Is that a typo? 

No. Erich Segal, I beg to differ. As anyone who has a life knows, love means having to say you're sorry a lot. And that goes for employers, too. The company apology is a fine thing, as long as it is sincere, not a "non-apology apology," and accompanied by what they call a "firm purpose of amendment."

If you don't apologize when ...

The latest guidance on social media and protected concerted activity, issued last week by Lafe Solomon, Acting General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, is for the most part an unrealistic, hair-splitting mess. ("But Robin, tell us how you really feel about it!") However, there is a somewhat happy ending that I'll talk about at the end of this post.

The first two ...

Giddyap! It's been a short week, but we have tons to talk about in the labor and employment law world!

Thinking out loud about the impact of yesterday's DOMA decision on the Family and Medical Leave Act. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit* held yesterday that Section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional. Section 3 provides that, for purposes of ...

If your job makes you want to kill yourself, are you a "direct threat" to your own safety?

In what has to be one of the weirdest ADA cases I've seen, a woman (let's call her "Gladys") was hired as a temp for a tech company in Seattle (let's call it "Initech"). A month later, Initech brought Gladys on as a regular employee. A month after that, Gladys told Initech that she suffered from chronic pain ...

The Wall Steet Journal has a feature on "Five of the Costliest Tweets Ever." (Subscription required, but I'll tell you all you need to know below.) This morning, Jon Hyman of Ohio Employer's Law Blog tweeted a link to a great flow chart from HR Bartender entitled "Should I Send This Email." Both are worth reading.

Number 1 of the "Five Costliest Tweets" was, of course, our old friend, former ...

Fellow blogger Jon Hyman, among others, has already written an eloquent critique of the latest report from the Office of the General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board on social media and protected concerted activity, and Dan Schwartz has a good roundup of what labor lawyers are saying about it (and also a call for employers not to overreact). If you haven't read Jon and Dan, you ...

Colin O'Keefe of LXBN TV interviewed me yesterday about the NLRB's latest report on social media, and what it means for employers. Here it is, but you may want to turn the volume down before you start -- my volume was a lot louder than Colin's for some reason.

Colin, thank you for the interview and for your kind words about Employment & Labor Insider!