4 ms·

The law they cite only seems to cover employees sharing pay with each other (and anything else involved in collective bargaining), but I can't see that it clear

The law they cite only seems to cover employees sharing pay with each other (and anything else involved in collective bargaining), but I can't see that it clearly authorizes publicly sharing pay.

p4wnc6 11y ago
It does protect publicly sharing pay. I can't find the specific case at the moment, but there was a case where workers who were striking had printed up a leaflet with a bunch of salary information and distributed it to other workers and general public. The company tried to terminate those employees for violating company policy and sharing "confidential" information with people in the public, but the court found this was a violation of their collective bargaining rights. It is a tricky issue though. I am sure that a powerful enough company that wanted to throw resources at it could make all sorts of arguments about whether certain parts of the information (e.g. bonuses, vesting schedules, options grants, stock price discounts, relocation provisions) are allowed to be classified as confidential even if basic salary is not. As a lowly employee, your only hope would be if some national labor union or pro bono legal institute took on your case, otherwise you'd never be able to afford the legal costs to defend your NLRB collective bargaining rights. With pay secrecy, it's unfortunately still mostly a "might makes right" situation, where rich companies can sort of make up their own rules and at the very least bankrupt you with legal nonsense even if they don't ultimately win. So few people have the fortitude to endure that kind of legal harassment that it implicitly still does censor our ability to talk about pay, even if it's illegal that this is so.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  Before this thread gets too stale, I did find a legal paper from Duke, 2006, talking about how certain kinds of blogging are likely protected by NLRA, "When is employee blogging protected by section 7 of the NLRA?" By Katherine Scott, < http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1163&context=dltr http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=... >. It looks like one of the main criteria is that it has to be a part of a "concerted action" to benefit a collection of employees, and this had historically been broadly interpreted in support of employees with a very liberal understanding of what a concerted action is. This whole HN thread about it, for example, would almost surely qualify (I am not a lawyer, of course, so that's not a professional opinion and not a form of advice for anyone here), since it is explicitly focused on the whole class of Amazon employees and encourages employees to share for themselves. I wish I could find the older case about the leaflets. IIRC it was from the late 1970s.

The law they cite only seems to cover employees sharing pay with each other (and anything else involved in collective bargaining), but I can't see that it clearly authorizes publicly sharing pay.

p4wnc6 11y ago

It does protect publicly sharing pay. I can't find the specific case at the moment, but there was a case where workers who were striking had printed up a leaflet with a bunch of salary information and distributed it to other workers and general public. The company tried to terminate those employees for violating company policy and sharing "confidential" information with people in the public, but the court found this was a violation of their collective bargaining rights. It is a tricky issue though. I am sure that a powerful enough company that wanted to throw resources at it could make all sorts of arguments about whether certain parts of the information (e.g. bonuses, vesting schedules, options grants, stock price discounts, relocation provisions) are allowed to be classified as confidential even if basic salary is not. As a lowly employee, your only hope would be if some national labor union or pro bono legal institute took on your case, otherwise you'd never be able to afford the legal costs to defend your NLRB collective bargaining rights. With pay secrecy, it's unfortunately still mostly a "might makes right" situation, where rich companies can sort of make up their own rules and at the very least bankrupt you with legal nonsense even if they don't ultimately win. So few people have the fortitude to endure that kind of legal harassment that it implicitly still does censor our ability to talk about pay, even if it's illegal that this is so.

p4wnc6 11y ago
Before this thread gets too stale, I did find a legal paper from Duke, 2006, talking about how certain kinds of blogging are likely protected by NLRA, "When is employee blogging protected by section 7 of the NLRA?" By Katherine Scott, < http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1163&context=dltr http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=... >. It looks like one of the main criteria is that it has to be a part of a "concerted action" to benefit a collection of employees, and this had historically been broadly interpreted in support of employees with a very liberal understanding of what a concerted action is. This whole HN thread about it, for example, would almost surely qualify (I am not a lawyer, of course, so that's not a professional opinion and not a form of advice for anyone here), since it is explicitly focused on the whole class of Amazon employees and encourages employees to share for themselves. I wish I could find the older case about the leaflets. IIRC it was from the late 1970s.