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Comment by seoaeu | Hacker News Reader

> Richard Ortiz was fired after the incident , but because Tesla did not have standing rules against browsing employees' profiles on Workday or screenshotting them , apparently that's not allowed.

The real question is if they'd have been fired for doing that if they weren't a union organizer. And perhaps more importantly, whether you'd be able to convince a judge that looking up co-workers on an internal directory and/or posting about them privately on Facebook is always a firable offense.

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I don't quite get that objection though, why do you need stated rules that a certain internal site is internal information? Everything is assumed to be internal information unless stated otherwise. That violates any HR policy anywhere. More so the guy was putting it on facebook to literally get people to stalk the guy. So I'm surprised he didn't get criminal charges.

You don't need the rules to know that sharing information from internal sites might be prohibited. You need them to be able to prove that sharing information like this would get somebody fired. The other possibility (which the NLRB seems to believe) is that Tesla normally would have been OK with this sort of sharing or given only a warning, but this time was specifically looking for an excuse to fire the employee.

Do you have info on the stalking? It is common practice when organizing a union to note the likely strongly anti-union people, to not solicit them, and inform them last of the effort. I say this because I presumed they were just screenshotting the guy's employment photo and name, and posting in the private group, "don't solicit this guy, he might scupper the effort."

Accessing org info for private purposes seems ethically deficient.

In the abstract I would agree, but there are degrees of offense before firing someone -- I would imagine I would not be fired for doing same when organizing who to invite or not invite if I was organizing a poker game ("invite anyone, except this guy"). So the actions here seem quite harsh and retaliatory. I haven't read the NLRB's report, but my thoughts are similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26598779

Really? It would seem more likely they would try to harass the guy who's anti-union.

Doesn't seem that way to me. As I said, one of the first steps in organizing is usually identifying your strong-no to strong-yes people, and building support among the yes side first. I don't have experience in organizing a workplace, but the information above is second-hand from conversations with people who have.

I have participated in "get out the vote" operations. In that case it's quite similar: you mostly want to avoid knocking on the door of likely-strong-no households, as you have so many likely-strong-yes doors to knock, and debating people on the doorstep is a waste of precious time when close to an election/primary -- so you can see the value in having a good data operation to know which houses are likely one way or the other, and spreading that knowledge to your canvassers.

I don't see how it isn't a firable offense given that it violates the confidentiality agreement that lists termination as a possible consequence of violation.

So it seems to me that what Oritz did must qualify as protected activity...

First of all, the system wasn’t treated as confidential information, and workers weren’t told that use of the system was restricted. Second, the data they extracted were simply names and photos. Third, they posted them to a FB group comprising Tesla employees. If you read the judgment, indeed, all of these actions are considered protected activity.

If you read the policy they had people sign (it is included in the official opinion linked in other comments) it would seem to be expressly included under that policy.

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