NLRB clarifies nonunion employees’ rights to discuss workplace conditions
A pay gripe, a group petition or a shared complaint can be protected at nonunion tech companies. The NLRB says managers can’t punish workers for acting together.
monday.com became a publicly traded company on Nasdaq on June 10, 2021 and sells software built for distributed work. Most private-sector employees are covered by the National Labor Relations Act, and that means a pay gripe, workload complaint or return-to-office petition can be protected activity even at a nonunion SaaS company. Workers do not need a union to have those rights when they act together for mutual aid or protection.
Protected concerted activity can include two or more employees acting together over terms and conditions of employment. A single employee can also be protected when acting on behalf of coworkers, bringing group complaints to management, trying to induce group action or preparing for group action. Section 7 of the NLRA protects the right to self-organization, collective bargaining and other concerted activities for mutual aid or protection.
Employers cannot discharge, discipline, threaten or coercively question employees for protected concerted activity. A coordinated complaint in a chat channel, a shared note about compensation or a group message about safety or workload is not automatically misconduct just because it is organized.
monday.com considers all qualified candidates regardless of race, color, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, pregnancy, family or parental status, disability, veteran status or any other protected characteristic. The company also offers remote-work resources and support material on permissions and administration.
A February 2024 monday.com blog post about low employee morale said 2024 had already brought cross-industry layoffs and that tech alone had lost more than 40,000 jobs in the first eight weeks of the year.
The National Labor Relations Board launched its protected-concerted-activity webpage on June 18, 2012, and the page showed more than a dozen recent cases.
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