DC Circuit Upholds NLRB Ruling in Firing of Complaining DBS Installers

DirecTV and MasTec Advanced Technologies, one of its contractors, were out of bounds firing a group of employees who griped to a Florida TV news station about pay policies, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled Friday, upholding a 2011 National Labor Relations Board ruling. DirecTV and MasTec said the workers' comments weren't protected concerted activity because of malicious untruths and flagrant disloyalty. Judges Judith Rogers and Sri Srinivasan -- who wrote the majority opinion (in Pacer) -- said the court's interest isn't where that line between protected and unprotected activity sits but on the correctness of NLRB's finding that the workers' appeal is on the protected side of that line. Judge Janice Brown dissented. The pay policy required MasTec installers to hook up DirecTV set-top boxes to customer phone lines, with MasTec setting up financial incentives and punishments for hook-up quotas, the D.C. Circuit ruling said. MasTec fired nearly all technicians who were part of a TV news broadcast about the policy, the court said. An NLRB administrative law judge said going public is protected activity, but their statements were so disloyal and disparaging that they weren't protected. The full NLRB disagreed that the comments to the TV news crew reached that level. Judges' decision Friday said MasTec workers' on-air comments "were neither so disloyal and incommensurate with their labor grievances nor so maliciously untrue as to fall outside" of National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) protections. They also dismissed DirecTV arguments that because the direct broadcast satellite company is the fired workers' employer's customer, the workers had no protected rights to criticize it, ruling DirecTV clearly committed an unfair labor practice in causing MasTec to do the firings. In her dissent, Brown said the workers crossed the line from labor dispute to public disparagement aimed at eroding the companies' reputations. "This is not a close case," Brown said, pointing to the workers' telling the station that MasTec was requiring them to lie to customers when it had not done so, and was trying to have them scare customers into accepting the service: "By soberly repeating that joke to a public audience without its context and as though it were a serious instruction, these technicians left the NLRA and its protections behind." DirecTV in a statement said it agreed with the dissent and is "considering [its] options.” MasTec didn't comment.