Know Your Digital Rights

This is organizer orientation, not legal advice—laws vary by where you are and who you work for, and the people with the lawyers want you to feel more powerless than you are. Get real counsel for your situation. But know the ground you’re standing on.

You have the right to organize

In the United States, the National Labor Relations Act, Section 7 protects most private-sector workers who act together to improve their conditions—talking about pay, raising safety concerns, organizing a walkout. This is “protected concerted activity,” and retaliating against it is an unfair labor practice. It covers you whether or not there’s a union.¹

Limits worth knowing: it generally does not cover supervisors, independent contractors, or purely individual gripes (the “concerted” part matters—act together). When in doubt, act as a group and put it in terms of shared working conditions.

Metadata is the tell

You can say nothing incriminating and still get mapped. Metadata—who messaged whom, when, how often, from where—is what an employer’s lawyers and a subpoena actually reach for. Seven people on the overnight shift who all text each other right after a manager meeting is a pattern, and the pattern is enough.

That’s the whole reason RORBT runs on a deaf server: no real names, no readable contact graph, nothing to hand over. But your habits have to match the tools.

Practical discipline

• Don’t organize on the boss’s infrastructure. Not the company Slack, not the work email, not a Google Sheet in a corporate account. Those are theirs.
• Keep the member list out of existence. No master spreadsheet of names. The safest list is the one that was never written down.
• Separate work and organizing devices/accounts where you can. Don’t sign into organizing tools on a managed work phone.
• Talk in person for anything sensitive. Trust moves face to face; surveillance can’t sit in on a parking-lot conversation.
• Assume nothing digital is private unless it’s end-to-end encrypted—and even then, protect the metadata.

If you’re retaliated against

Document everything: dates, what was said, who was present. Retaliation for protected activity may be an unfair labor practice you can file on. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense is a solid plain-language primer on protecting yourself digitally.²

Related

• Vouching & Trust—keeping new members safe.
• Safety Culture—the habits that protect a whole Orbit.

Footnotes

1. National Labor Relations Board, “Concerted Activity.” ↩

2. Electronic Frontier Foundation, Surveillance Self-Defense. ↩