Bulletin Board Use Case Study Questions

Bulletin Board Use: Case Study Questions

Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act grants employees the right to be affiliated to a labor union of their choosing, and to exclusively engage in any concerted activity on behalf of the same, including communicating and soliciting support for the same. This text presents answers to case study questions demonstrating how the provisions of section 7 influence the use of bulletin boards at the workplace.

Case Study Questions: Bulletin Board Use

Is an employer required to have bulletin boards at the workplace?

State law requires employers to post certain information, such as information on employment laws, health and safety laws, and minimum wage laws for employees to see. However, such postings do not necessarily have to be made on bulletin boards -- they can be made through email, social media platforms or in face-to-face settings such as in meetings and conferences. For this reason, employers are not obliged by law to have bulletin boards in their organizations (Holley, Jennings & Wolters 220). All the same, most employers opt to have the same because they help to ensure reliability in such communication, better than email, telephone, or meetings. For instance, owing to job-related commitments, employees may not be able to check their emails regularly; moreover, it could be rather costly for the organization to hold meetings and seminars, or make telephone calls any time there is need to communicate an urgent or crucial matter.

Besides ensuring more reliable and less costly communication, bulletin boards may also be beneficial to employees. To begin with, they provide platforms through which employees can be acquainted with information on vacant positions, upcoming training programs, and other human resource initiatives. When recruiting internally, it is more cost-effective and reliable to communicate vacant positions on a bulletin board in a high-traffic area such as a hallway, cafeteria or break room, compared to using email or word-of-mouth communication. Moreover, bulletin boards could aid in fostering strong bonds among employees by offering a platform where they can post photographs of personal events such as vacations, graduations, birth of children, marriages and so on. By providing such spaces on their bulletin board, employers increase employee motivation as the latter feels that the organization values their personal lives and looks out for their social well-being. It is beneficial, therefore, for an employer to have bulletin boards in their organization, even though the law does not require them to. They come in handy in the day-to-day communication of the organization.

Question 2: If an employer did not provide bulletin boards at the workplace, would employees have a right to provide and mount their own bulletin boards?

No; as I mentioned earlier on in this text, employers have a duty to communicate certain crucial information to their employees; for this reason, they need to post the same in such a way that it is accessible and conspicuous for all employees to see. The overriding purpose of such communication is to ensure that employees are kept aware of their rights and freedoms at the workplace. However, the law does not oblige employers to have bulletin boards for this purpose -- as such, the choice of whether or not to have a bulletin board is the employer's. Thus, bulletin boards will only be present in an organization if the employer deems it appropriate, and if organizational policy allows the same. Employees, therefore, in as much as they have a right to access crucial communication from their employers, have no right to provide and mount their own bulletin boards without the consent of their employer. The best that they can do is request their employer to put up the same, and then provide sufficient reason for how the organization stands to benefit from the same.

Question 3: If there are company-provided bulletin boards at the workplace, does the employer have a right to restrict the type of material that can be posted there?

Yes, bulletin boards are part of organizational policy, and just as the employer has a right to determine whether or not they will be present in the organization, they also stand to determine the type of material that can be posted there. Most organizations will usually have multiple bulletin boards, which means separate bulletin boards for official company business, for employees' private postings, and so on. Towards this end, the employer can essentially restrict the type of information that it is posted on the official company board if such information does not meet the criteria for 'official communication' specified in the organization's policy. Information posted on bulletin boards in general can also be restricted if it is malicious or causes harm to other members of the organization.

However, there are a number of exceptions to this regulatory right. First, the employer has no right to regulate information posted on a bulletin board by employees if such information relates to concerted activity protected by section 7 of the NRLA about union organizing (O'Keefe). Moreover, an employer has no right to regulate such communication if the restrictions on the use of the particular board on which the communication was made were not enforced as the employee handout provided (Baird 299). In this regard, therefore, an employer would be deemed to have acted unlawfully if he/she removes an employee's posting on grounds that it does not qualify as official communication based on the provisions of the employee handout, yet there is evidence to prove that such postings had been made by employees on the same board in the past, and the employer had not acted in the same manner. The employer's right to restrict the type of material posted on the organization's bulletin boards by employees can, therefore, be described as limited.

Question 4: In this case, did the employer unlawfully deny union supporters access to company bulletin boards for union solicitation purposes? Explain.

Yes; the employer in this case acted unlawfully -- both exceptions to the employer's regulatory rights were in fact violated. First, the employer's actions violated the union supporters' rights to concerted activity, guaranteed in Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (O'Keefe). Section 7 of the NLRA grants employees the right to be affiliated to a labor union of their choosing, and to exclusively engage in any concerted activity on behalf of the same, including communicating and soliciting support for the same (Baird 297). The union's supporters' activities in this case, which included garnering support from their colleagues in the organization, was protected by section 7 of the NLRA, and by removing the union activity postings from the bulletin board, the employer unlawfully violated this right (Baird 302).