Rojgar Job News

“President Trump is a Big Fat Idiot” or, for that matter, “Secretary Clinton is a Sore Loser.” Let’s suppose you see one of your employees tweeting one of these expressions on Twitter during non-work hours from a personal account. Can you discipline or even fire your employee over that tweet? That, in essence, is at the heart of an issue that has been circulating in the sports pages (and in the President’s press briefings) over the last week due to the tweets of ESPN Sportscenter Anchor Jemele Hill from her personal account that were critical of the President. The New York Times, in fact, ran a story on Saturday discussing the legal ramifications; it was nice to be quoted in the article. While that article does a good job of summarizing the law in part, there’s a bit more to the story that is useful exploring (however briefly) in a blog post. First off, people do not generally have a First Amendment protection for things that that they say that ...

It happened again, last week.  An employer was sued. Wait, what’s that? A new lawsuit gets filed EVERY day against employers?  (Actually, in federal court, at least 11885 employment lawsuits were filed in 2017. Far more than one a day.) But last week, there were a bunch of headlines – a new sexual harassment lawsuit filed against a major Connecticut employer. (I’m not going to mention it here for reasons that will become apparent in a second). News organizations ate the new lawsuit up picking up scurrilous allegations that were even denied by some of the people involved. This, of course, isn’t the first time that this happened — that is, news organizations publishing the fact that a lawsuit was filed. Why? Is it really news? Reporters would say yes, the public has a right to know.  And in fairness to them, a new lawsuit may have some newsworthiness. But I’d argue that many reports about lawsuits get published for far simpler reasons ...