Are employees who even mention the word "union" on employer-organized internal message boards protected under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935? "This is kind of a new frontier, a gray area," Austin Garrido told me in a conference call with fellow former Uloop employee Sarah Doolittle last week. He and Doolittle claim they were fired after discussing unionization efforts at the college-focused social network. As their complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board continues to be investigated, one thing it could hinge on is if discussion about forming unions online is protected in the same way that posting a flyer in the company break room or chit-chat amongst coworkers on a shop floor. "It's something that really hasn't been considered in the past," Doolittle added. And what about third-party employee networks on sites like Facebook?

The incident largely ocurred within the confines of a forum specifically set up by Uloop to enable employees scattered across American college campuses to communicate with other. When on payday a number of employees found their checks were short, a thread was started to discuss the matter with each other — since management hadn't formally or informally alerted anyone to the pay cut, according to Garrido and Doolittle.

Garrido says management fired the pair within twenty minutes after bringing up the prospect of unionizing. He also reported that management began to call every employee who had left a message in the thread — shortly before deleting it entirely. Which sounds a lot like typical offline actions long deemed illegal by the NLRB: Intimidating employees in order to deter them from organizing, and removing employee-posted, pro-union materials from designated areas of the workplace.

When I asked Garrido and Doolittle if they had contacted, or been contacted by, any existing unions or support, they pointed out that they no longer had access to fellow Uloop employees, having been fired and banned from the message board. And while an ad-hoc group could possibly be assembled on Facebook, it offers no safe-harbor — management can moderate "networks," including deleting messages, and can monitor employee-created groups simply by joining.

In other words, until the NLRB has ruled one way or the other, if you're going to try to organize employees online, which in the case of Uloop's disparate workforce is really the only way, it's best to copy what contact information you can from employee directories and set up as secret and private a system as you can manage on your own. As poet and activist Audre Lord once pointed out, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."