Hacker News Reader

Comment by YetAnotherMatt | Hacker News Reader

>>Section 1: The policy of the United States is to be carried out "by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment..."

Section 7: "Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or bargain collectively through representation of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining..."

Section 8(a): "It shall be an unfair labor practice for an employer . . . to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed in Section 7..."

From https://www.ueunion.org/org_rights.html

Looks like that would be illegal to my non-lawyer interpretation.

Worse happens every day, this would be extremely evident though.

View on HN

The NLRB recently reversed itself and said companies can prevent their workers from organizing on the work email system. Expect the same would apply to FB Workplace.

https://www.reuters.com/article/labor-disclosure/workers-can...

That decision only applies when the company has a policy of no non-work conversations at all. If you allow planning a volleyball game on the weekend you can't turn around and then say no discussion of working conditions.

IANAL but I would assume FB is in the clear legally though as they're not actively blocking anything in particular, merely providing the tool with which admins can do the blocking themselves.

Kind of odd that they would choose to promote their product by touting a feature that is illegal to use.

"it should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter."

It is not that simple. There's a continuum from writing a compiler to coding DestroyBaghdad. Usually people draw the line at "Is this tool primary purpose evil?".

This tool is in a (darkish-)gray area IMHO. I don't think that employer blocking "fuck" or racial slurs is necessarily evil but it's not that good either.

Automatic filters are pretty bad at doing their job, so filtering is a lame approach to solving anything.

A tool that can block discussion of unionization is certainly a grey area. When you literally advertise "blocking discussion of unionization", I feel like you've left that grey area, though.

Just to be clear, I wasn't saying it's not unethical. Just not illegal.

This is reminiscent of how Facebook used to allow people to microtarget job and housing ads to people based on protected classes like race, age, and gender. They ended up reaching a settlement and being forced to change their filter criteria due to civil rights laws. So I wouldn't be so sure that "merely providing the tool" is necessarily an entirely legal action.

They'll probably move to categories or something that can be banned, rather than explicit lists.

The tool itself is generic, somebody at FB just thought it is a bright idea to use "unionize" as an example in a marketing pitch.

Pretty sure this interpretation would amount to compelled speech. They are not entitled to facebook or their employer broadcasting their messages. They can use their own resources to organize.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com