Most employers prefer that employees not discuss their wages with people they know. They definitely prefer that employees not complain about their pay on Twitter. So when a Chipotle employee at a Haverford, Pennsylvania, restaurant did exactly that, the company asked him to delete the posts. Eventually, the company fired the worker. However, earlier this year an administrative law judge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ordered that the employee be rehired and held that the company’s social media policy violated the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).
The situation began when a Chipotle crew member took to Twitter to vent about his job. In January 2015, he tweeted several times to complain about working on snow days. The employee also used Twitter to express his dissatisfaction about crew members’ hourly pay rate of $8.50. Soon after, a supervisor told the crew member that the tweets violated the company’s social media policy that prohibited employees from making disparaging and false statements about Chipotle. The employee took the posts down, but was fired several weeks later for organizing a petition claiming that workers weren’t getting their required breaks.