Keep Up with Current Employment Law Issues

In the Digital Information Age, where electronic data containing confidential information is so easily transferable, employers face a dilemma. On the one hand, they generally want to allow employees as much access to information as possible to promote efficient and uninterrupted workflow. On the other hand, there is always the risk that employees with access to highly sensitive information may misplace hard copies and/or flash drives containing such information or purposefully take key information to use on behalf of a competing future employer, for a business they have started or intend to start, or to damage the company because of a personal vendetta.  
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In recent years, as the use of social media has exploded, the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) has received allegations of improper discipline of employees for social media postings as well as complaints condemning employer social networking policies. We briefly discuss a few of those decisions below.

In what came to be known as “the first Facebook case,” American Medical Response of Connecticut, Inc., No. 34-CA-12576, an employee criticized her supervisor in a Facebook post for denying her Union representation, which triggered responses from co-workers voicing their support. The employee was suspended the following day and later discharged. The NLRB alleged in a complaint that the employer’s internet and social media policies were overly broad and violated Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (the “NLRA” or “Act”), which gives employees the right “to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.”
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Many employers try to limit former employees’ actions at the conclusion of the employment relationship through restrictive covenants. A restrictive covenant is a contractual agreement restricting the post-employment activities of a former employee for a fixed period after the termination of an employment relationship in order to protect the employer’s legitimate business interests.

A. Protectable Interests

Non-compete agreements offer the widest range of protection for employers by limiting a prior employee’s ability to work for a competitor after the employment relationship ends. However, this type of restrictive covenant is often the most difficult to enforce and is generally disfavored in New York. New York courts will enforce non-compete provisions only to the extent necessary to protect an employer’s legitimate interests and where they are reasonable in time and geographic area. Such courts consider the protection of the following kinds of information to be legitimate protectable interests:

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