The report comes to you from one of your very favorite federal bureaucracies and is intended to help education employers as to what they can and can't ask of employees. The NLRB is taking this opportunity to expound upon recent case law and legal developments to make sure that employers don't include anything in an employee handbook that could be interpreted to chill employees from discussing terms of employment or working conditions. To do that would run afoul of the Act.
Below are some of my favorite examples of what the NLRB says are acceptable and unacceptable for your employee manual. I'd like to subtitle this post, "Reason 984 to Not Become an Employer."
Below are some of the strictly verboten terms from the report solely dealing the the topic of employer confidentiality. The entire report goes on for 30 pages and contains other hair-splitting minutia on the topics of conduct towards supervisors, conduct towards co-workers, third party communications, logos, photography/recording at work, leaving work, and conflicts of interest. It is mind numbing.
Illegal Handbook Terms Regarding Employer Confidentiality:
- Do not discuss “customer or employee information” outside of work, including “phone numbers [and] addresses.”
- “You must not disclose proprietary or confidential information about [the Employer, or] other associates (if the proprietary or confidential information relating to [the Employer’s] associates was obtained in violation of law or lawful Company policy)
- “Never publish or disclose [the Employer’s] or another’s confidential or other proprietary information. Never publish or report on conversations that are meant to be private or internal to [the Employer].”
- Prohibiting employees from “[d]isclosing … details about the [Employer].”
- “Sharing of [overheard conversations at the work site] with your co-workers, the public, or anyone outside of your immediate work group is strictly prohibited.”
- “Discuss work matters only with other [Employer] employees who have a specific business reason to know or have access to such information…. Do not discuss work matters in public places.”
- “[I]f something is not public information, you must not share it.”
- Confidential Information is: “All information in which its [sic] loss, undue use or unauthorized disclosure could adversely affect the [Employer’s] interests, image and reputation or compromise personal and private information of its members.”
Legal Handbook Terms Regarding Employer Confidentiality:
- “Misuse or unauthorized disclosure of confidential information not otherwise available to persons or firms outside [Employer] is cause for disciplinary action, including termination.”
- “Do not disclose confidential financial data, or other non-public proprietary company information. Do not share confidential information regarding business partners, vendors or customers.”
- “Do not disclose confidential financial data, or other non-public proprietary company information. Do not share confidential information regarding business partners, vendors or customers.”
- Prohibition on disclosure of all “information acquired in the course of one’s work.”
