City Requests Social Site Information from Applicants
It’s long been the case that employers check out the social websites of potential applicants to see the real nature of the people they are considering hiring. But trying to view an applicant’s MySpace listing, for example, can be problematic because there might be multiple listings under a given name, and the listing may be not be available for public viewing.
City officials in Bozeman Montana have decided to stop being sneaky about the whole process. When applying for a job there, applicants will find the following question on the employment form:
"Please list any and all current personal or business Web sites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc." The form also asks for the user names and passwords for all the requested sites.
Of course, organizations such as the ACLU are all up in arms, claiming privacy violations, but the desire of the City is understandable. As has been reported here and at my Internet Defamation Blog, people sometimes reveal amazing things in their blogs. I’ve reported a case involving a nurse and another involving a teacher where their blogs revealed some seriously dark sides and the employees suffered job actions as a result. No one balks when an applicant for the police department is seriously vetted, including reviews of banking records and interviews with friends and former employers. It should not be surprising, therefore, that a city would want access to this truly revealing information.
I offer no opinion on the matter, beyond to say there is just something troublesome about a government agency wanting personal access codes. However, it is also a bit disingenuous to claim an invasion of privacy when the employer is seeking only information that the applicant has chosen to publicly publish. In essence, any objecting applicant is saying that they have the right to reveal only the face they choose to reveal, and that the employer is not entitled to see the face that is shown to others.
Incidentally, the City says that applicants can refuse to provide the requested information, and that will not be held against them.
UPDATE: Responding to the public outcry, the City of Bozeman backpedaled -- slightly. In a press release, the City Manager announced that the City, for the time being, would not request user names and passwords from job applicants. Conspicuous in its absence is any mention that the city will stop requesting information regarding non-password protected sites, or that it will not review those sites.
Again, I think it was a bit much to request user names and passwords, but I applaud the City of Bozeman for being so upfront about the fact that, as an employer, it will seek out these social sites as a part of its background check.
Crunchberries Provide Proof Positive That the Legal System Works
Attracted by the nefarious Cap'n Crunch, calling out to her from his cereal box, holding a spoon chock full of crunchberries, Janine Sugawara bought said cereal and for four years continued to buy and consume it, all the while believing she was eating healthy fruit.
When she somehow came to realize that there was no fruit in Cap'n Crunch, she sued on behalf of herself and all the other consumers that believed that the cereal contained anti-oxidant rich crunchberries. She contended that the entire Cap'n Crunch presentation was likely to confuse consumers, especially given the way the Captain is aggressively "thrusting a spoonful of crunchberries at the prospective buyer." (See photo.)
On a motion to dismiss, Judge Morrison England, Jr., sitting in the Eastern District of California, ruled:
"In this case . . . while the challenged packaging contains the word "berries" it does so only in conjunction with the descriptive term "crunch." This Court is not aware of, nor has Plaintiff alleged the existence of, any actual fruit referred to as a "crunchberry." Furthermore, the "Crunchberries" depicted on the [box] are round, crunchy, brightly-colored cereal balls, and the [box] clearly states both that the Product contains "sweetened corn & oat cereal" and that the cereal is "enlarged to show texture." Thus, a reasonable consumer would not be deceived into believing that the Product in the instant case contained a fruit that does not exist. . . . So far as this Court has been made aware, there is no such fruit growing in the wild or occurring naturally in any part of the world."
Plaintiff's are usually given at least one opportunity to amend a complaint to address any deficiencies, but in this case the judge dismissed without leave to amend, concluding there was no way this case could be saved. As the court put it, "the survival of the instant claim would require this Court to ignore all concepts of personal responsibility and common sense." The only sad part of this otherwise humorous case is that plaintiff was able to find counsel willing to ignore that common sense.
Go here for more information, and here for the complete opinion by the court.
Appeal Court Says, "Hold the Foam" on Starbucks Tipping Case
Some plaintiffs attorneys received a huge pay cut today, after the California Court of Appeal reversed an $105 million judgment against Starbucks.
The case involved the ever-present tip jar that sits by the register at your favorite Starbucks. It is the procedure of Starbucks, like most every other business that has a tip jar, to split up the tips among all those that were working, including the “supervisors.” As we analyze this case, keep in mind that a “supervisor” at a Starbucks is most likely just another barista that has been there slightly longer than the other baristas, and as a result is put in charge. It’s not like this is someone at the corporate office.
Enter California Labor Code section 351, which states that no “employer or agent” shall take any part of the gratuity “left for an employee by a patron.” An “agent” is defined by section 350(d) as anyone who can hire or fire, or who controls the acts of the employees.”
These rascally class action attorneys thought they had Starbucks by the beans. First they created a somewhat fictional perception of the role of the “supervisors” and spent a great deal of time in the case arguing that they were agents of the employer because they directed the conduct of the other employees. From that viewpoint, it was easy to claim that Starbucks had violated section 351 by including the supervisors in the tip distribution. Judge Patricia Cowett in San Diego Superior Court must have skipped her coffee that day and bought that reasoning and awarded the class of 100,000 baristas $86.7 million, which grew to $105 million with interest.
But the Court of Appeal said, “hold the foam.” The flaw in the logic is obvious (understanding that I always have perfect 20-20 hindsight with court decisions). When I sit down at a restaurant, enjoy my meal and the service, and then leave a tip, I am leaving a tip for my specific server. However, when I order a latte at a Starbucks and drop my change into the tip jar, who am I tipping? I'm certainly not intending to tip only the barista. At that point, I don’t even know who is going to prepare my beverage (or even if it will be tip worthy). It is probably far more likely that I'm tipping the friendly cashier that accurately took my order and retrieved my scone. Or perhaps my intent was to tip the person that cleaned the washroom where I washed my hands before stepping up to the counter. As you can see, in the case of a community tip jar, we can never truly know who generated the tip, so it makes much more sense to assume that it is my intent to tip everyone working there, who have all joined to make this such a special coffee experience, from the supervisors down. Indeed, the Court of Appeal concluded that the purpose behind section 351 was to “prevent a fraud on the tipping public” by prohibiting an employer from giving a tip left for a server to someone not intended by the tipper. There is no such fraud with the Starbucks tip jar.
Further, the “supervisors” are not “agents” of the employer in the sense meant by section 350. The supervisors are not there to grab the tips on behalf of a greedy Starbucks organization; they are just more experienced baristas, probably earning 50 cents per hour more and completely entitled to share in those tips.
The ruling of the Court of Appeal reversed the judgment.
It's OK to Question Litigation Costs
After more than 20 years I can’t believe this sort of thing is still going on.
On-line legal research offered by Lexis and Westlaw used to be very expensive. These services charged by the hour and according to the database being used. Printing out what the research revealed was also expensive, with the services charging by the line. An intensive research session for a major motion could cost thousands of dollars.
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service. The firm gladly passed along word of the contest and the associates obliged by signing on and staying on for days at a time. Only after I pointed out the conflict of interest in such an arrangement did the firm cancel the contest.Trade Secret Claim Costs Company Over $17 Million
A case that illustrates how NOT to deal with company secrets.
An RV sales manager – we’ll call him Trealoff because that’s his name – was hired by Forest River, an RV company. Forest River was apparently on the cheap side, because it didn’t even provide Trealoff with a computer, forcing him to use his own laptop. According to Trealoff, the company also did not provide him with a promised raise, so he went looking for another job.
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When the company got suspicious that Trealoff was looking for greener pastures, it was decided that Trealoff really should not be permitted to leave with all the data residing on his personal laptop computer, gained while he was an employee of Forest River. Reasoning that the data was, after all, the property and trade secrets of Forest River, the president of the company, according to the case, decided that the best course of action was to temporarily steal Trealoff’s laptop and erase the hard drive. Trealoff took exception when his erased hard drive was returned to him, especially given that it contained years of contact information that he acquired independent of Forest River, so he sued.
The San Bernardino jury took exception to the conduct as well, and in addition to awarding Trealoff damages for unpaid commissions, the jurors tacked on punitive damages of $7 million against the RV company and $8 million against the president. (Personally, despite the egregious conduct, I would have found Trealoff contributorily negligent for not backing up the data in the first place.)
Lessons for all businesses: First, get over this concept of trade secrets unless you really do have trade secrets. In many instances, when a company calls me ready to go to the mattresses over alleged trade secrets, I find that the information is not at all secret. For instance, I once represented a company that was being sued by one of their salesperson’s former employers, because the salesperson had contacted their customers. There was no non-solicitation or non-disclosure agreement; the entire basis for the suit was that the customer list was a trade secret. I went on-line and found that the company’s entire customer list was proudly displayed on its website. Case dismissed.
Second, proceed with caution when pursuing trade secret claims. Many companies file groundless lawsuits in an attempt to frustrate a former employee’s efforts to work for a competitor. They reason that even if the action ultimately fails, it may be sufficient to persuade the competitor that the employee is just too hot to handle. If the company decides to call your bluff and hires a firm such as ours, then you will likely be taken to the woodshed, as was Forest River.
Third, provide your employees with computers so that the information contained thereon remains yours.
Another Court Holds that Driving is Not a Major Life Activity
For there to be a successful claim of disability discrimination against an employer, there must first be a determination that the employee is, in fact, disabled. Under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), a medical condition can be deemed a disability causes an impairment of a "major life activity." Many disability claims therefore turn on the interpretation of what is a "major life activity."
Such was the issue in the 7th Circuit case of Winsley v. Cook County. Plaintiff in that case was a nurse, and her position required that she drive to the homes of the patients. For medical reasons, the plaintiff became unable to drive, accept to and from work. The County could not continue to employer her with that restriction, and she claimed that was disability discrimination.
On a motion for summary judgment, the trial court concluded, and the District Court agreed, that driving is not a major life activity. The court noted that activities recognized as major life activities by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) "are so important to everyday life that almost anyone would consider himself limited in a material way if he could not perform them." The court concluded, however, that "this is not the case with driving." The court noted that the 2nd, 10th and 11th Circuits have all reached the same conclusion.
As you can see, the determination of what is a "major life activity" can be very nuanced. Most of us would feel very limited if we could not drive, but the law looks more at the body than the activity. For example, if a medical condition made it difficult to sit for periods of time, the court might find that to be a sufficient impairment. But translating that inability to some external activity such as driving is less likely to pass muster.
Twitter Comments Can Land Businesses in Court
Twitter comments (along with others) have now become the basis for an Internet defamation lawsuit.
Courtney Love, always a class act, has been posting “tweets” about fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir, also known as Boudoir Queen. Simorangkir claims that Love failed to pay money that was owed to her. Love claims otherwise, and refered to Simorangkir as a “nasty lying hosebag thief”, as well as accusing her of being a drug addict and a prostitute, according to the Associated Press.
Assuming the comments were false, the statements are clearly defamatory, but the case will still present some interesting issues if it ever makes it to trial. Defamation is always about reputation, and defamatory remarks do not always translate to loss of reputation. Given the context of the statements and the person making them, will anyone believe that Simorangkir is guilty of the acts claimed by Love?
Lesson for all businesses: Are your employees "twittering" or sending instant messages from their computers at work? Plaintiff attorneys look for the deep pocket, and if an employee sends a defamatory tweet from an office computer, you can bet your company will be named in the action. One way to protect the company is to make such conduct outside the scope of employment, and it is only outside the scope of emploment if the company has a written and enforced policy against using company computers for such purposes.
Can Businesses Terminate Employees for Blog Posts?
The Internet, through social websites and blogs, offers fertile ground for employers that want to run an informal background check on current and prospective employees. And, since everything eventually ends up in court, the actions taken when something unacceptable is found during such a background check provide new issues for lawyers who deal with free speech and defamation.
Take the case of Nina Yoder. She was expelled by the University of Louisville's nursing school because of her Internet postings. Yoder has now sued the university, alleging that the expulsion violated her First Amendment rights.
The nursing school expelled Nina Yoder on March 2, saying her MySpace postings "regarding patient activities and identification as a University of Louisville School of Nursing student violates the nursing honor code which you pledged to uphold," according to a copy of her dismissal letter, which was attached to the suit.
In her blog postings, copies of which she attached to her own complaint, Yoder makes caustic comments about Christians and blacks. I attempted to go to the website to make my own determination about the appropriateness of her comments, but she appears to have taken down her MySpace page.
According to an article posted at courier-journal.com, the nursing school is upset because some of Yoder’s postings are about specific patients (although they are not mentioned by name). In one of her postings, she wrote about a birth she witnessed: "Out came a wrinkly bluish creature, all Picasso-like and weird, ugly as hell ... screeching and waving its tentacles in the air." I’m not sure a patient would want the miracle of her child’s birth described in that way by someone who should, like any medical professional, respect her privacy, but I can also see that as a failed attempt to humorously describe what she had seen.
But there was far more. The school officials were probably equally unimpressed when Yoder wrote about how the nursing school is in downtown Louisville, adjoining an area "inhabited by humanoids who have an IQ of 10 and whose needs and actions are basically instinctive. As in, all they do is ––––, eat, –––– and kill each other." She did, however, graciously concede, "OK, maybe I am generalizing yet again."
As discussed in a prior blog posting, Yoder and her supporters are using the "there’s so much trash on the Internet you can’t hold my trash against me" defense. As Yoder wrote in her petition requesting reinstatement to the nursing program, "If profanity was grounds for dismissal for the School of Nursing, the nursing school would go bankrupt." Her petition to the school for reinstatement can be seen here.
The court has not yet set a hearing date on Yoder’s request that the nursing school be ordered to reinstate her. We’ll know then if the trash defense worked. The standards are different in the academic arena than in the employment context. Under California’s at-will presumption, an employer would generally be safe terminating an employee for something said on a blog, but California’s Constitution affords more free speech protections than even the First Amendment, so tread carefully. For a more detailed analysis of employees and blogs, see You Write What You’re Told.
Defamed Businesses Finding More Barriers to Redress
A recent decision out of Maryland illustrates the legal tension that exists between anonymous Internet defamers and the businesses they victimize.
Someone trashed a Dunkin’ Donuts on-line, claiming it was unsanitary and dirty. DD didn’t appreciate that comment, and sought the identity of the person who had posted the comment. In deciding whether the message board was required to disclose that information, Maryland’s highest court decided that the victim of the comments must go onto the board and basically give notice to the defamer. This gives the defamer an opportunity to protect his anonymity by removing the offending comment (although some unscrupulous sites won’t allow the person that posted the comment to take down his own message). Then the victim must persuade the court that the comments constitute defamation. Defamatory comments are not protected speech, so the court can then require disclosure.
It’s a tough course for the victim, because being forced to go into the lion’s den will often only fan the flames. However, as this case makes clear, a victim may well be barred at the door if he does not have the fortitude to take that step.
For a more complete discussion of the Maryland case, go to Internet Free-for-All Promises An Ongoing Test of Free Speech.
Top Five Employee Suits
The EEOC recently identified the five most commonly filed employee suits, which are:
sex discrimination and harassment (30.1 percent);
retaliation (22.2 percent);
race discrimination (13.5 percent);
disability discrimination (12.8 percent); and
age discrimination (8.2 percent).
Sadly, many such cases are fomented by plaintiffs’ attorneys who don’t properly advise their clients. Never mind that in a huge number of cases there is not a scintilla of evidence that the termination was based on discrimination, it is enough that the employee belonged to a protected class. In most cases the employer ponies up some cost of defense settlement amount to avoid the uncertainty of trial.
Thus, no one can advise you how to keep your employees from pursuing legal action, but my first post on this site still remains solid advice on how to ultimately prevail if you decide to go the distance.
