Facebook’s not the place to make grossly disparaging remarks about your employer — that should not be a new concept to most employees. And while employers should be careful about overly restrictive policies, there is a line beyond which employees can be fired. In this case, a Chicago area car salesman’s posts about cheap food his employer served at a sales event were okay, but photos of an on-site car accident justified firing the employee.
The salesman lost his unfair labor practices case that contended a dealership improperly fired him for his Facebook posts. An administrative law judge (ALJ) at the National Labor Relations Board www.nlrb.gov on Sept. 28 ruled against BMW salesman Robert Becker, according to an NLRB press release.
First, the salesman used Facebook to mock his employer, Karl Knauz Motors, over the quality of food and beverages at a dealership event promoting a new BMW model.
That same day, he posted pictures of an accident at a neighboring Land Rover dealership, owned by Knauz Motors. A salesperson had allowed a 13-year-old boy to get behind the wheel of a vehicle there, and the youth drove it into a pond. Becker’s comment was: “This is your car: This is your car on drugs.”
Management of the BMW dealership didn’t like the negative and sarcastic tone of Becker’s comments and asked him to delete the posts, which he did, but he later was fired after a managers meeting. See the Chicago Tribune article on this.
Becker had contended he was engaging in protected speech about the terms and conditions of employment when he made the online sarcastic comments about his employer.
The ALJ ruled that the postings and back and forth with other employees about the food at the sales event was protected activity, but the
postings involving the accident were not. Since Becker was fired for the accident postings, he was not protected, the ALJ concluded.
The ALJ ruling came in spite of his opinion that the car dealership had an overly broad employee policy, which tended to chill employee
rights to discuss certain matters.