Do you have a right to complain about your job and your employer on social media? It might not be advisable for your career, but a recent National Labor Relations Board decision is that Chipotle was wrong to fire an employee for his tweets about the company’s labor practices and because his manager feared that he may become violent.
Grubstreet reports that the employee was told to take his tweets down after the company’s chain-wide social media strategist found them. After that, he argued with a manager over a petition protesting the company’s break policies, and was ostensibly fired for another reason.
That reason was a fear that he might become violent at work, with the manager noting that he would punch boxes at the restaurant while flattening them and breaking them down.
The problem with that is that the former employee is an Iraq war veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, and the NLRB ruled that firing him because of the condition was discrimination against him as a person with a disability.
“If it weren’t such blatant disability discrimination, [the manager’s] testimony would be laughable,” the administrative law judge handling the case wrote in her ruling.
For his part, the former employee isn’t sorry that he complained about the chain’s low pay and guacamole surcharges on a public forum, or that he circulated a petition.
“A lot of times your bosses will sugarcoat what’s going on” when reporting to their own bosses, he told the New York Daily News when Chipotle was ordered to give him his job back this past spring, an offer that he declined.
Chipotle Broke the Law by Making an Employee Delete Tweets [Grub Street]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
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