NLRB overturns Obama-era ruling on employee email

In an expected move, a Republican-controlled National Labor Relations Board has overturned an Obama-era ruling and held employees cannot use employer-owned email systems for union-related or other concerted activity.

The board’s 2-1 ruling Monday in Caesars Entertainment et al. and International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, et al. held prohibiting employees’ email system use does not violate Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, which protects employees’ concerted activity regardless of whether they are union members.

The ruling overturns the 2014, Obama-era Purple Communications ruling, which allowed workers to use employer email systems for union business, and returns to the rule in the George W. Bush-era’s 2007 Register Guard.

The move had been expected with the restoration of a Republican majority to the NLRB.

“The NLRB’s unprecedented decision in Purple Communications impermissibly discounted employers’ property rights in their (information technology) resources while overstating the importance of those resources to Section 7 activity,” said the majority opinion.

“Accordingly, we shall overrule Purple Communications and return to the standard announced in,” it said.

“As the Board observed in Register Guard, an employer’s communication systems, including its email system, are its property.  Accordingly, employers have a property right to control the use of those systems,” it said.

The dissenting opinion, by sole Democratic board member Lauren McFerran, states the majority’s decision “aims to turn back the clock on the ability of employees to communicate with each other at work, for purposes that the National Labor Relations Act protects.”