Tag Archives: NRLB

Employees Secretly Recording Workplace Conversations

Discrimination, Documentation, Employee Rights, Forms and Policies, Investigation, Personnel Policies, Privacy, , , , , , , ,

Is it legal for one of your employees to secretly record your conversations with that worker for the employee to use as evidence in a discrimination case? If you are a Texas employer, the answer is “yes”.

Texas is a “one-party” consent state, meaning that as long as one party to the conversation knows about the recording, the recording is legal. This can lead to your employee secretly starting the video app on his smartphone in his pocket just before he walks into your office for a disciplinary meeting. He knows the conversation is being recorded, so as the supervisor, you don’t have to be informed in a one-party consent state like Texas.

More than 30 states have the one-party consent rule, while California, Washington, Florida and a few other states require that every person being recorded give permission to the recording. These “all consent” states make it impossible for a supervisor to be secretly taped when talking to an employee. Making a recording without permission in one of those all consent states can lead to both criminal liability and exclusion of the tapes as evidence in the employee’s discrimination or other lawsuit.

In Texas, however, when an employer is taped, the recordings can be material evidence when an employee sues for discrimination. The Houston Chronicle reported in 2011 that one-third of the discrimination complainants who reached out the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission office in Houston brought audio tapes from their workplace to play for the EEOC investigators.

If there is a recording with you as a supervisor using a racial slur, firing an older employee while saying that the company needs “fresh and energetic workers” or suggesting to a subordinate that he/she can expect a raise if the employee will accompany you to a hotel, you might as well get your checkbook and pen out now to facilitate the inevitable settlement.

Besides the obvious – THINK BEFORE YOU SPEAK, here are some other steps you as an employer can take to protect yourself and the company from employees taping all of your interaction:

  • Adopt a written policy banning recording: As of June 2018, the National Labor Relations Board has newly declared that employers may prohibit employees using recording devices and cameras at work. This is a change from a 2015 NRLB opinion that such policies had a chilling effect on employees asserting their rights to document poor working conditions. In 2018, it was decided that no-photography/no-recording rules have little impact on NLRA-protected rights and could actually improve working conditions by forcing supervisors and subordinates to have open discussions and exchanges of ideas.
  • Ask employees if they are recording: Before you have a hard discussion with an employee, such as a disciplinary warning, ask the employee if he/she is recording the conversation. Make a written note of his response (juries don’t like liars who produce recordings when they stated they weren’t taping). You can remind the employee about the company policy prohibiting such recordings. Ask the employee to set his phone on your desk so you can assure that he isn’t recording or, even better, have him leave it at his desk before coming into your office.
  • Be careful about disciplinary actions for recording: If an employee does record in your workplace, don’t automatically warn or fire that employee even if it violated your policy. You need to know what the employee recorded, so ask to listen to the tapes. If the employee did record or photograph unsafe workplace conditions, sexual propositions, racial epithets, etc., then you need to do a formal investigation and apply effective remedial measures to fix the problem the employee’s recordings uncovered. Then carefully decide with your legal counsel whether disciplining the employee who violated your recording policy could lead to an unfair labor practice, retaliation or whistleblower claim.
  • As the employer, don’t audiotape others in the workplace without consent: While you may have video cameras in the non-private areas of your workplace for safety purposes or to monitor productivity, it becomes more complicated to make audio recordings. Wiretapping (recording the conversations of others without consent when you are not a party to the discussion) is illegal under several statutes. So, you would need permission of every employee as well as the consent of every vendor or guest who comes into your business if you were going to wholesale audiotape all the interactions in your workplace. It can be done, but it is complicated to do correctly, and the wiretapping law is easily violated. And personally, in more than 30 years of practicing employment law, I’ve only seen a handful of situations where widespread audio recording was helpful to a lawsuit defense, much less positive employee relations.

Sexual Harassment Prevention Training Essential

Discrimination, Management, Personnel Policies, Training, , , , ,

Training photo

Every employer with 15 or more employees needs to require employees to attend sexual harassment prevention training. That is the takeaway that businesses need to understand from a new task force report on harassment in the workplace that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published in June 2016.

The EEOC’s report states that businesses have “to reboot workplace harassment prevention efforts.” The EEOC is especially concerned that most sexual harassment  prevention training focuses only on defining harassment and telling employees what they are prohibited legally from doing.

Instead, the EEOC is encouraging (read: requiring) businesses to also include workplace civility training and bystander intervention training. If a disgruntled employee makes an illegal harassment claim against your business in the future, the EEOC, as the investigating agency, is going to immediately require your business to provide evidence that you thoroughly trained your employees on these new topics. If the harassment complaint goes to trial, this training will also be your best defense.

Bystander Intervention Training is defined by the EEOC report as training that helps employees identify unwelcome and offensive behavior and creates collective responsibility to step in and take action when they see other employees exhibit problematic behaviors. The training is geared towards empowering employees to intervene when they see unacceptable conduct and gives them resources to do so.

Workplace civility training focuses on teaching employees to abide by reasonable expectations of respect and cooperation in the workplace. The emphasis is supposed to be positive—what the employees should do—rather than those things they are prohibited from doing. The training needs to include navigation of interpersonal relationships, an understanding of conflict resolution and teaching supervisors how to be civility coaches. In other words, it is now the company’s responsibility to teach workers how to be responsible, respectful professionals. On the job training and supervisor modeling is fine, but you need to add formal in-house training also.

Interestingly, at the same time that the EEOC is “encouraging” employers to promote more civility in the workplace and to prevent bullying and harassment, the National Labor Relations Board is issuing decisions that punish non-unionized businesses for written policies requiring employees to be respectful to coworkers.

The NRLB has repeatedly found that a company is infringing on an employee’s labor rights when the employer enforces handbook policies like this one from T-Mobile’s employee manual: “Employees are expected to maintain a positive work environment by communicating in a manner that is conducive to effective working relationships with clients, co-workers and management.” The NRLB thinks that kind of policy has a chilling effect on employees who have a right to discuss with coworkers all of the terms and conditions of their employment. I’ve alerted you about the NRLB’s crusade against policy manuals before.

So you as an employer are left with trying to decide whether to be investigated and sued by the NLRB or the EEOC. Continue reading Sexual Harassment Prevention Training Essential →