Getting the Deal Through is a series of annual reports that provide international analysis in key areas of law and policy for corporate counsel, cross-border legal practitioners, and business people. By consulting this book, employers and their counsel can quickly familiarize themselves with the essentials to guide them through all stages of the work relationship, from application to hiring, termination, and disputes, in multiple jurisdictions.
Morgan Lewis is a featured contributor on labor and employment issues for the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the United States, as well as the "Global Overview" and this year's featured article, "Social Media and Employment," available below. Country-specific chapters are available from the sidebar.
Global Overview
by Mark Dichter, Kenneth Turnbull, and Ellyn Pearlstein
In this sixth annual publication of Labour & Employment, we have maintained the same general question-and-answer format to address many common issues that arise in the employment setting. The questions have been organised into the following categories:
- legislation and agencies;
- worker representation;
- background information on applicants;
- hiring of employees;
- foreign workers;
- terms of employment;
- liability for acts of employees;
- taxation of employees;
- employee-created IP;
- business transfers;
- termination of employment; and
- dispute resolution.
As with past years, this year welcomes new chapters for 2011, which include reviews of the labour and employment laws in Austria, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Norway. Although 2011 continues to see the effect of the global economic crisis, the various chapters deal less with the crisis than in years past, in the hope of moving on despite continued economic uncertainties.
Social Media and Employment
The use of social media, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, MySpace and Twitter, has grown enormously in recent years, and throws up particular challenges for employers. For example, could their use by employees infringe confidentiality obligations? Is the company's intellectual property adequately protected? How can the employer protect its reputation? Can employees be disciplined or terminated for misuse or overuse of social media? Can employers be held liable for discrimination or defamation damages if their employees say things that they should not? How does the employer monitor its employees, and are there privacy concerns in doing so?
Recognising these concerns, the Trades Union Congress, the national trade union centre in the UK, commented in 2007 that employers who simply ignored the issues posed by employees' online postings until faced with a problem to which it had to respond rendered the UK's then 3.5 million Facebook users "3.5M HR accidents waiting to happen." In our experience, employers have generally been slow to adopt tailored policies and strategies in order to deal with the particular concerns that employees' use of social media, and targeted marketing by employers through this media, present.