Burger King Employee Blogger Fired For Blog Posting

The Associated Press wrote an important employment law article dated May 14, 2008 entitled  Burger King Employees Fired Following Controversy Over Blog Posts.

A secretary secretly posted information on a blog where she reportedly slammed a farm workers advocacy group. Additionally, the president of a firm that Burger King did business with attempted to infiltrate this group. The secretary was fired and     Burger King stopped doing business with the firm in question. The article describes what happened as follows:

Following an investigation, Burger King Corporation has terminated two employees who participated in unauthorized activity on public Web sites which did not reflect the company's views and which were in violation of company policy," the company said in a statement.

The company owned by Burger King Holdings Inc. said Tuesday it hopes to meet with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers soon to find ways to ensure decent wages and working conditions for the region's harvesters.

Coalition co-founder Lucas Benitez said in a statement the group welcomed Burger King's actions but said more needed to be done "to clear the path toward a sincere partnership for more humane conditions in Burger King's tomato supply chain."

I bring this to your attention because it illustrates limitated rights many employees have who are employed at will, as presumably these individuals were. It is not even clear that the President was an employee. Employees who are employed at will can be fired without a hearing so long as their termination does not violate some other law such as Title VII. There is no First Amendment right to speak in the private sector workplace.

Workplace Prof Blog is also covering this story here.

Mitchell H. Rubinstein

[Image is from Google Imgages which picked it up from blogs.menupages.com]