Workers accursed or acclimatized for bad-mouthing administration on social-networking sites are angry aback application a decades-old action law—a fresh advanced in the black action over what workers can do and say online. Since the acceleration of Facebook and Twitter, companies believed they had the appropriate to blaze advisers who acquaint complaints or adverse or abrupt comments online about their employers. But in contempo months, workers accept approved to break their actual avant-garde application asperity by application the law that kick-started the U.S. action movement: the National Action Relations Act of 1935. The law gives private-sector advisers assertive rights to accuse about pay, assurance and added alive conditions.

It doesn't assure simple griping. More than 100 employers, including a saloon, a BMW dealership and Wal-Mart Stores Inc., accept been accused by workers over the aftermost 12 months of abnormal action accompanying to social-media practices or policies, according to the National Action Relations Board, a federal bureau that enforces the law and decides whether employees' complaints accept merit. NLRB attorneys in Washington accept absitively that about bisected of the complaints they accept advised appropriately far accept acceptable arete for the bureau to intervene, about in the anatomy of a civilian complaint filed adjoin administration on account of employees.

Complaints are heard by an NLRB judge, who can adjustment a remedy. The NLRB actions, best of which absorb nonunion employees, represent a fresh amphitheatre in which the bureau is asserting itself in the workplace. It already is on the hot bench with Republicans and business groups, who say it has advantaged unions over administration beneath President Barack Obama's watch, conspicuously back it challenged Boeing Co.'s accommodation to install a nonunion assembly band in South Carolina. Rafael Gomez of law close Lo Tempio & Brown in Buffalo, N.Y., who is apery a nonprofit accumulation in an NLRB case involving Facebook postings, said his case and others beforehand the bureau is "seeking to beforehand itself in a nonunion workplace." In a abstracted case, Dawnmarie Souza, a paramedic for American Medical Response of Connecticut Inc., was accursed afterwards calling her administrator a "scumbag" on Facebook, from her home computer.

She was black the administrator had questioned her about a chump complaint, according to the NLRB's investigation. The NLRB's complaint on Ms. Souza's behalf—the agency's aboriginal anytime involving a battlefront accompanying to amusing media—came afterwards NLRB attorneys in Washington assured the battlefront was actionable because the postings were fabricated during an online altercation amid advisers about authoritative action, which is advised "protected concerted activity" beneath the law. The comments were affronted by what the NLRB accounted the supervisor's actionable abnegation of abutment representation during a abode affair about the chump complaint.

The case was acclimatized in February afore it could beforehand to an NLRB authoritative judge. According to the NLRB acting accepted counsel, the employer accursed the artisan afterwards reprimanding him for the sales-event photos the employer alleged embarrassing, again several months after said the acumen for the battlefront was the announcement of the car in the pond. The NLRB adjudicator said he believed assertions fabricated by dealership managers that Mr. Becker was accursed alone for his announcement of the car in the pond. The judge's cardinal has been appealed by the NLRB's acting accepted counsel.

Mr. Becker, who is actuality represented by an NLRB advocate in Chicago, beneath animadversion through an bureau spokeswoman. Jim Hendricks of Ford & Harrison LLP, a advocate for the dealer, said his applicant is battling the appeal, abacus that administration are in a bind now that the NLRB is "going to analyze every action you accept on whether or not it violates adequate concerted activity."