Rights of employees in the digital age

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.kansascity.com/business/story/610263.html

Posted on Wed, May. 07, 2008 10:15 PM

Two college students in California may force the National Labor Relations Board to enter the 21st century — but don’t get your hopes up soon.

The presidential election season has put politics over expediency.

Once we get a new president, and the new president’s appointments fill vacancies on the NLRB board, we may finally get a workplace-savvy ruling from the board about employee-organizing rights in the digital age.



A bit of background: The NLRB board made a neo-Luddite decision in December in a case known as Register-Guard when it failed to recognize that “remote” workers communicate with each other online.

The decision in that case failed to recognize that in widely dispersed workplaces many co-workers never meet in break rooms or by bulletin boards, the traditional gathering spots for employee communication.

On the heels of Register-Guard, here’s the new case to watch:

Sarah Doolittle and Austin Garrido, two California Polytechnic State University students worked part time for ULoop.com, an online marketplace for college students on campuses.

Early this year, they noticed that their paychecks were a lot smaller than expected and, upon inquiry, learned that their pay rate had been cut without notice from $10 an hour to $8 an hour.

They posted a message on the ULoop-sponsored message board set up for employees on dispersed campuses, saying that they wanted to form a union. Twenty minutes later, they said, they were fired, ostensibly for using the company’s site for union-organizing activities. ULoop isn’t commenting.

FULL story at link.