Back three years ago, I warned how you could accidentally have the National Labor Relations Board come a’knockin’ on your door even if your workplace is not unionized. Now that Obama is gone and Trump is in, perhaps you were thinking that this is no longer a concern. If you were thinking that, you’d be engaged in some dangerous self-deception.
In December 2017, the Trump NLRB specifically emphasized that there are (and I quote)
“… rules that the [NLRB] will designate as unlawful to maintain because they would prohibit or limit NLRA-protected conduct, and the adverse impact on NLRA rights is not outweighed by justifications associated with the rule. An example of [this kind of per se illegal handbook rule] would be a rule that prohibits employees from discussing wages or benefits with one another.“
The Trump NLRB underscored this again in June 2018. The NLRB’s General Counsel’s memo 18_04 reiterates that you can’t prevent employees from talking about: salaries, contents of employment contracts; information pertaining to the wages, commissions, performance, or identity of employees of the Employer; working conditions or other terms of employment. Employees can talk about all of those things with each other, and employees can talk about all of those things with the media.
Bottom line: check your employee handbook, and get rid of the stuff that the NLRB says is per se illegal.