Facebook Friends-Workplace Enemies
Facebook Friends-Workplace Enemies
Tuesday, September 19, 2017
OPERATOR: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Facebook Friends - Workplace Enemies conference call. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode. We will open up for your questions on today's presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Peter Berg to begin. Sir.
PETER BERG: Hi, thank you very much. Welcome, everyone, to the September audio conference session. My name is Peter Berg, I’m the Project Coordinator for the Great Lakes ADA Center. The ADA Audio Conference Program is a collaborative effort of the of the ADA National Network, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration on Community Living, National Institute on Disability, independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research. So, welcome, all of you.
We are very late in summertime. We are just a few days away from Fall, oh, my. We are very pleased that you have chosen to join us today. We have an excellent topic and an excellent presenter with us today. Joe has been a presenter on the ADA Audio Conference in the past. Joe is also a very frequent and popular speaker at the National ADA Symposium. So we are very, very glad to have him with us today.
As Joe mentioned, he is with the Houston District Office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Joe is the outreach and training specialist with the -- I'm sorry, Outreach and Training Coordinator at the Houston Field Office. So, with that, I would like to turn it over to Joe Bontke from the EEOC. Joe, welcome.
JOE BONTKE: Thank you very much, Peter. And welcome to everyone who's on this favorite topic of mine. While the EEOC very often may appear to use social media, we are by no means, experts at it. And what I'm offering today is not the gospel according to the EEOC. I'm only offering some technical advice with regards to where social media and employment collide. And in this collision, kind of the fascinating piece of it is very often where . . . I'm on the second slide of my presentation, or your 11th slide.
The primary and secondary dimensions of diversity. So, the sociologists of Rossner came up with the this notion that we are prewired to certain elements in life, the inner circle of sexual orientation, race, gender, age, ethnicity, physical qualities. And then there’s this attributal things with regard to income, religious beliefs. And then, what has emerged in the last dozen or so years is another ring of how open the book are we with regard to social media, and whether or not we dabble in it or are a voyeur in it or remain completely opposed to it.
And I kind of collect that in the next slide with regard to cultural groups. And the notion of cultural groups are people who consciously or maybe even unconsciously share some kind of values or norms, or ways of living that are repeated and transformed from one generation to another. So it seems as if what has emerged is people who do or do not go on social media.
And I'm going to allude to one of my favorite teachable moments in the next slide called the backpack theory of education. So, the backpack is this imaginary cadre of "my stuff," race, religion, age, comfort levels with it, as well as a whole array of family of origin, cultural identity, God-given talents, abilities, disabilities, and all those things that make me who I am.
And very often, I may look at somebody else and see an attribute of their backpack. And I think I know what's inside it. And we do that interacting with people with regard to physical features, as well as maybe sports logos, or maybe some kind of religious jewelry or garb, and have a tendency to equate that person with somebody we like. We do like them. Stereotypes, pigeon holes.
I've lived here in Texas for 27 years. I didn't know I was a Yankee until I got here is my favorite line. I was a transplant Brooklynite. My wife and I came here. We were considered damn Yankees because we stayed. So we moved up the social ladder quite a bit in Brooklyn. We were in the melting pot there. We lived in New Jersey. They considered us white trash from Brooklyn.
So, those funny attributes are never meant to offend. But we know in society how many of these stereotypes can be offensive at times. When we have a work relationship, on the next slide I talk about the obligations to make a workplace free of unlawful discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. And often we think in terms of the civility code, or acting with those soft skills.
The hard skills of your resume get you a job. The soft skills of interaction with people more or less help you keep the job, or maybe get you promoted, or enable you to interact with people. The things that we learned in kindergarten, play nice with others, say you're sorry when you hurt somebody, clean up your own mess.
Those are really those build-upon things. So if an employee were to come to you as a supervisor and say, "every morning Joe comes in and says how are you doing and I feel harassed by them," now we have a piece of knowledge that we have to act upon. So that’s the second bullet. Promptly and confidentially investigate. Take a look-see. What does this person in your care, custody, and control have that is of concern to them?
Is Joe saying how are you doing, and maybe taking a look at that the next day? Because if he does it every day, we will have a better idea of this. And when Joe goes up to this coworker, he hangs over her and gets into her space. And the next slide talks about the personal space in the U.S. -- intimate distance, personal distance, social distance and public distances. And maybe when he says, how you doing in a Joey format that might be less than appropriate, that there might be an understanding that in a social or public distance is where you should remain in interaction with people who don't like you in their space.
That's kind of a commonsense approach to how we deal with each other. Social media, we kind of have to take a little common sense out of it, because it seems as if it's still in flux with regard to where appropriate may lie in the notion of the use of it, how it's to be interpreted, whether it's a youthful indiscretion that somebody has left in footprints, or what concerns does an employer have if an employee is texting or saying something to another employee.
And it's no longer just saying it in the breakroom where that message may go off into the atmosphere. Now there are electronic footprints left behind. So in this slide, there is a press release from way back in 2014 where social media is part of today’s workforce. But it's -- may raise employment discrimination concerns.
And I want to build on that notion because in another post, the three social media hiring mistakes of the next slide can lead you to EEOC's bad books. And it seems as if a very surprising thing happened early on in the “electronic footprints”. And I'm putting that in quotes, because I don't have a good name for it yet. But about a third of the people who came to our district office with charges of discrimination, harassment, or retaliation, brought with them some type of evidence that they believed made a case for them, whether it was a text message, or a screen grab of what somebody said, or some kind of a recording.
And your first reaction would be, somebody can do that to you? Well, there are no rules and regulations as I'm going to show you, with regard to the internet. And I could take my phone out and record anyone in 27 states without ever telling that person a recording device exists. So the realities of capturing data, information, evidence, is a new normal.
Then it opens up another can of worms in my next slide, where I ask the question, can I Google applicants? Well, like I said, there are no laws. But I want to take a few moments to look at what’s legally allowed to search when investigating a candidate for employment, what's the return on investment of that screening, what's the current case history, and some new tools or methods for analyzing the information.
Because while you can Google anything you want, how do you know you’re getting . . . Well, my name is unfortunate. I'm the only Joe Bontke on the internet. But the love of my life, my wife of 32 years, is Joy Smith. Google her, and you going to get 6,400 of them. And there lends itself to the problem.
So when we think in term of protected categories of race, religion, creed, color, national origin, age, sex, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, genetic makeup, those realities very often are something that people may surmise, but I take the position of Google search has answered many of these questions for you. It'll show my affinity towards groups of people with disabilities.
It may even show me in social media of my religious affiliation. Definitely my race. And if you catch me on a posting on St. Patrick’s Day, something of my national origin also. Seeing that I am gray-bearded and play Santa Claus for the 12th month of the year, I also am going to fall over the 40 plus category.
So the open book aspect is also a reality. And I'm not going to stay problematic, because I'm not doing anything wrong. But the stereotypes, my next slide, that oversimplification of a statement applied to a whole group of people without regard to the qualifications of the individual, may, in fact, be problematic. Because you're managing a risk in hiring somebody of getting a cat in the bag and doing a due diligence, or a background check, or a Google search, may, in fact, all be good things.
But what if your comfort zone about something you learn was less than somebody else's comfort zone? So let's look at this example. Who would you pick? We're going to look for a new CEO. The first candidate can't walk, can't stand without braces, they run the entire length of his leg, can't get out of bed, get dressed, reach the bathroom, get to a desk without the assistance of another person or use a wheelchair.
Candidate B hand a glandular disorder, back problem, and often uses painkillers, has been hospitalized nine times in the last decade, once for 19 days a couple times a week. And candidate C has a history of depression. And if you know your history, my three candidates are Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Abraham Lincoln. Pretty good CEOs for my standpoint. And the reality is, depending on the spin that you're going to give them, there may be a sad reality of a perception before the reality.
Then when a new hurdle comes about, there may be some fears, myths, stereotypes that sometimes could be irrational. So this is a picture of me in the center holding a young boy in a red hat, who by the way is getting married on Saturday. So he's much older now, as am I. And this is when I was Vice President of a consulting company called Accessibility Consultants. We were at a chili cook-off.
During that time, the fear of HIV was rampant in our society because no one knew much about it. And it was the beginning of the plastic glove syndrome for cooking teams. And it was really kind of comedic in some respects, because while it was a great food handling prevention, the efforts to sanitize was a bit of overkill.
And I learned something in that short amount of time during this irrational period that sometimes we have to take another look at what we think we know. If I had the time and we divvied up all of the people on this call according to your generational groups, we would have traditionalists, my mom and dad's generation, born before 1945. Me and my lovely wife, who are baby boomers. My gen Xer coworkers, my wonderful millennials, I have three millennial children that are 81-2000, or the gen Zer's, 2000 to today.
If I had five representatives, one from each of these groups, and we asked the groups to define something as simple as a universal concept, appropriate casual team player and effective communication, do you think each of my generational representatives would define these universal dynamics the same way? And I take the position that no, what is appropriate for my son is very different than I.
And what I tell our interns to come to the federal building casual isn't always casual in my mind. I have to define it as business casual. Or the news person that says the team helps me shine, where I say there's no I in team. And my favorite one is effective communication. Sometimes we have to have an understanding and agreement of how we will effectively communicate.
I got a text not too long ago from somebody who was texting in that they were sick that day. And the text message said, "Feeling ugly this a.m. seeing the Dr. This PM. Tomorrow is iffy." While I understood that they were going to the doctor and that they were sick, my problem came about when I didn't recognize the phone number and I had no idea who they were.
And being the boss, I didn't want to lose all credibility by saying, who is this? I realized I just waited to see who didn’t show up. Now, it's okay that you text in. But it wasn't part of my backpack. I think the point that I'm trying to get across is, sometimes the way we've done something may not be the way everybody else does it.
I have a very famous phone call that summed up Joe, I need your help. I have a teller here at the bank with a really inappropriate tie on. Could you give me a call? Now, tweet your interest, what kind of tie do you have to get the federal government involved in? And I called this person back and I could hear relief in her voice. Thank God you called, Joe, I can't have him in that tie. I'm in the policy procedural manual, it says he has to wear a tie. I don't know what to do.
This young man had been to bourbon Street and bought a penis tie. You have to be pretty drunk to spend the $14.95 on the tie, you have to be really stupid to wear it to work. I think we're all in agreement with that. That's the reasonable person's standard. We have understanding and agreement that this is a novelty item.
And when I said to her, tell him to take the tie off, there was this pause. And she says, what a great idea. I'm so glad I called. And that's why I'm convinced we need an amber alert for common sense, because she's missing. And the realities of the fast-paced notion of open book or I'm not telling anybody about anything, the two ends of the spectrum of social media, may lend itself to many of these universal dynamics that across the generational divide we may need to redefine.
The anti-defamation league puts out a lot of great lesson plans. On the next slide, I lifted the hate violence pyramid from them. So, acts of bias at the bottom of the pyramid, the stereotypes, the jokes, the rumors, the justifying biases by seeking out like-minded people. And I think we saw an awful lot of that on social media during the pre-election time. And now in a post-polarization time, where what seems to have emerged is a real sense of prejudice and bigotry and scapegoating and name-called and epithets.
And while these are noncriminal, they can lead to the next level of blatant disregard for another human being by harassment, discrimination, housing discrimination, or educational, or some kind of social exclusion. ISIS is at the top of the pyramid as a genocide. And it seems as if the sticks and stones elements of the bottom of the pyramid may, in fact, lend somebody to a comfort zone that very often escalates it.
Social media has been an interesting platform for that. And I think sociologists will study this in the future to be able to say how quickly our evolving standards of decency start to snowball. So, on slide 27, there are about 540,000 words in the English language. And while that may not be so phenomenal for most folks, the reality is it's about five times as many as during Shakespeare's time.
So just in the development of one language and over the course of a few lifetimes, we can see how we have evolved with a lot more ways to say things. And that's just the characters and words, and punctuation. About 3,000 new books are published every day. And this is all coming from, is social media a fad, a YouTube video.
And I think I'm going to give you the URL in a moment to be able to see it on your own. There it is. And while I am not hooked up with sound to be able to do this, this PowerPoint will be archived. And it's yours for the taking and editing and making it your own. But it asks you to take the seven or nine-minute version of this and go through it. They update them every so often.
And the fascination with the fad of this generation's hula hoop of social media is nothing more than a phenomenal opportunity to communicate to vast numbers of people almost instantly. And I've realized in this, I just turned 60 this past summer, that my relaxation time -- and I've been an avid reader for the majority of my adult life -- has changed from the physical newspaper to the iPad.
And the amount of input that I'm able to get through an iPad has been through a phenomenally different array of sources. And the interesting part about that is the bits and pieces of having to justify where these sources are seems to be a new phenomenon. In the digital age, the next slide, we're welcoming into the virtual world of our friends with Facebook and Instagram, and usually its like-minded folks or family members that we have a tendency to either keep it civil, or simply by a toggle switch, unfriend.
LinkedIn seems to have taken on a new resume or marketing for the business world. And I'm going to call that Facebook in a suit. And Twitter is nothing more than a micro-blog of 140 characters in instant messaging on steroids. And in this day and age, while I have dabbled in all of it, I can honestly say that the amount of information that has transcribed across the internet is very often short-lived.
Now, let's look at this in a global sphere. There are almost 2 billion registered Facebook users. And to put that into the context of groups of people, if it were a country it would be the third-largest between India and the U.S. And that doesn't include Twitter or the floundering Myspace. Here lies the first problem. And the problem comes in the form of a young lady who was very embarrassed by what has happened.
And it's called the internet never forgets, in slide 34. Stacy Snyder was at the time a student teacher at a Pennsylvania university. And part of her requirements to receive her Master’s degree was to go to a local high school, student teach there, under the guidance of the Dean of Students at the university and the principal.
And during one of the faculty outings, one of her coworkers tagged this 21-year-old as a drunken pirate. And you can see on her picture there she has a costume pirate hat on and is drinking out of a plastic Mr. Goodbar cup. And when the principal of the high school passed this on to the Dean of Students, her doing it was to show how well Stacy had fit in with the crew and how enjoyable it was having this young blood around.
The Dean of Students took this information and said a woman of this moral caliber is unfit to educate children. Her Master’s degree and her teacher's certificate were denied by the University. So the internet records everything and never forgets, but in this case it created a scenario that we don’t know what’s in the cup. We don't know why somebody put drunken pirate as a tag on the picture. The perception became the reality.
Stacy is very embarrassed about this. It's seven years ago that this happened. She is still not a teacher today as far as I’ve been able to tell. She no longer does interviews. I asked her to come to a conference that we were holding in Austin, Texas. And the reality was the First Amendment freedom of speech doesn’t cover photos. Every online photo, Facebook, Twitter, and blog entry about us can be there forever.
So, lending itself to the problematic of that one issue, there is what I'm going to consider the poster child for this newfound phenomenon of perception becomes reality. And while the university dean never did an interview about his decision, he held to it. And I think generationally, we had another divide there with regard to understanding how somebody is depicted.
Shortly after the July 10th, 2010 New York Times article, in March of 2012, one of our student interns came in with a concern that at an interview, an interviewer had asked her for her password sign-on, Facebook sign-on and password. And she wanted to know could they do that.
I did a Google search and saw that there are actually legislators who are trying to pass laws preventing this information from going out. And there are probably many of the people on this call today who have Facebook accounts, and never read them when they said I accept. And one of the things you accepted was the 7th paragraph in the fine print.
It says never give your Facebook sign-on or password out to anyone. And how I learned that was I called Facebook and asked them what should I do about this. And when you call from an EEOC phone, the receptionist at Facebook says, who would you like to talk to? And I said the general counsel. And the next person who answered was the general counsel. (Chuckling)
And I heard him clicking. He says Joe, I see you're on Facebook. Then I got a friend request from him. And I realized that they lived in a very different world than I did. And I told him the scenario. And he says here's the answer. If you have an intern or an entry-level person who goes to an interview and is asked for their sign-on or password, the best answer you can give them is I’m sure Mr. or Mrs. Employer, you want to hire rule-followers.
I'm a rule-follower and I have an agreement with the software company Facebook to never give that out. And I've accepted that and agreed to that. You wouldn't want me to break that rule, now would you? And then just shut up. Best answer I thought anyone could come up with, because we're still trying to figure out what is the reality with regard to all of this new-found freedoms.
There is a next slide, a Vegas hangover bus giving one Aggie a headache. So, this is a quick story where Hangover Heaven, a bus that will take somebody who has imbibed too much the night before and hook them up to an IV and replenish their electrolytes, and for the swipe of your credit card of $39, they will more or less end your hangover within this 30-minute period.
The unfortunate part of this student intern from Texas A&M, lovingly referred to here in the great state of Texas as Aggies, is every Aggie who leaves Aggie land wears a t-shirt that tells you where to return them if they get lost. And while his name wasn’t part of the AP photo wire story, he was recognized. And he was brought up on charges of inappropriately depicting the university in an unfavorable light, by the billboard of the t-shirt.
Just take a look around anybody in your office. How many of us are wearing the logo of where we are on our lanyard, or our ID, or maybe the polo shirt, or the casual Friday t-shirt? And that reality may be part of social media also. So let's get to the big question. Can we Google applicants? And while I already said yes, I just want to show what the return of the investment may be.
So if you Google me, you will find out there's only one, Bontke is not a common name. There's one Joe. I have three children and a wife. But I keep my audiences very separate. There is an EEOC Facebook page. Go ahead, join it. It's a great opportunity to get information. I won't friend you on my family Facebook page. I'm a real beard Santa.
I do that as a keep me sane kind of thing in December. And that I mainly leave for families and friends, and neighbors, and people I’m associated with in a cooking ministry that I run. Very different than work. And while it says I've been in the field of human resources on my Facebook page, it doesn't say I work for a federal agency of the EEOC.
And I think that's an important element, because if it did say that, then I would fall under all of the same policies and procedures of being a federal employee, or even though I'm on my own time, because I'm using that platform to depict myself as an employee. On my LinkedIn, I say where I work and I keep it workplace appropriate.
And while I was the Chair of the Governor's Committee for People with Disabilities, I use that as a great statewide platform to be able to get information out. Three very different pieces of information come together in my Twitter feed, where@joeBontke I will stay completely outside the realm of anything to do with work, although I have re-tweeted some work-related things.
You can't tell from where I post where I work. Now, the Google search is going to give you that information. But I'm going to hold the position that as long as my page isn't depicting it, there’s a difference. I already tweeted out from @houstonEEOC that we're doing a webinar. I wouldn't use my Twitter account for that.
Knowing your audience and the differences of who you reach may be a point, but let's peel the onion more. 317 million users on Twitter and the Library of Congress has been acquiring and storing the entire archive of public Twitter posts since its inception. In other words, if you've ever tweeted anything, congratulations, some of your writing is archived in the Library of Congress.
It'll look good on a resume. But is it the best of your writing? And I think the realities of that will yet to be seen. So I take the importance of a policy. A twoosh is a perfect tweet. It's a word invented that described a Twitter message that contains exactly 140 characters. One of my coworkers, Marty, came up with this wonderful Twitter policy in a twoosh.
Be professional, kind, discreet, authentic. Represent us well. Remember you can't control it once you hit update. And that’s exactly 140 characters. Edit it, make it your own. It used to be called plagiarism, now we call it word processing. So here's a sad reality that I was quoted in the New York Times back in that July of 2010 article that 75% of recruiters are required by their companies to do online research of candidates.
And 70% of the recruiters report they have rejected candidates because of information found online. So let's let that sink in. 70% of the stack of resumes or the applications for a given job are excluded based on information found online. Now, we know from my very early slides that you can't make a decision based on race, religion, creed, color, national origin, age, sex, disability, veteran status, genetic makeup, sexual orientation. And what are they finding?
So here lies the big question mark or the problematic. Screening tools for job applicants is a good thing. Let's start with that premise, because I want to do my good due diligence. I want to find out how this person is best going to fit into my applicant pool. I want to get to the top five or seven and interview them.
These are all very positive things. And all of the statistics that I'm giving you are either from Yahoo, Microsoft, I think the next one might be the Society of Human Resource Managers. Here’s a problematic issue on slide 46. Employers will potentially have information or access to information such as involvement in a stakeholder group, or that you're a person with a disability organization, or a sexual preference or religious or cultural identification, which in essence may have nothing to do with the job being applied for.
But maybe one of those bottom of the pyramid kind of biases that somebody is managing. So not only is it putting a picture on the resume, but maybe because I liked on Facebook disability.gov, or have copied and pasted some of that and my friends are also depicted in that, it shows problematic. And I listed one of my friends’ pages.
And on their pages were just pictures from our histories together. And I thought, would somebody who did not have the affinity of what the 27-year-old law of the Americans with Disabilities Act was meant to do understand that there are a large pool of individuals who are underemployed or unemployed who may be in this cadre of folks?
And is the affinity with this group showing a hand to a potential employer beforehand, before you got a chance to prove yourself. The hard skills in the resume will get you in the door. The soft skills will get you the job. So this came home to me -- and I’m going to introduce you on slide 49 to my family. So, on the far left of the page, that's my smoking hot wife of 32 years, Joyce.
And next to her is my daughter Jackie. That's me next to my son, who’s getting married on Saturday. And next to him is the girl he was dating that week. Then the last female there is my oldest daughter Gillian and her husband Zack. They live in Austin. I said to her, please take that picture down. Why daddy? Because it depicts that we were in the Race for the Cure while my mom, who’s now 87, was battling breast cancer.
She's six years cancer free. She's doing great. But this slide shows that the Bontke women, especially my two daughters, may have numbers and the predisposition towards breast cancer as a genetic predisposition. Now, why am I showing you this picture? Luckily, all of these people are very healthy.
But I have seven of those cases at the EEOC, but I can't show you those families' pictures, because that's confidential. But I got all of these people's permission to use the example. And I think the realities of we never know the perception that somebody’s seeing by our reality or our simple posting.
We all know the Fourth Amendment, unreasonable search and seizure. This has nothing to do with the internet. Under common law, we have the Electronic Communications Act of '86, for wiretapping, and the Federal Stored Communications Act. None of this has yet to be applied to anything on the internet.
And then we have the evolution of some of these cases, and case law is always good to redefine what is existing and the letter of the law. So back in '87, the Supreme Court recognized privacy protections, pre-internet, where an employee's privacy expectations can be shaped and restricted by the employee policies and procedures.
And an employee had a legitimate expectation of privacy in his or her desk and file cabinets. And that's only '87. When did that go away? Because I don't have that today. And I'm sure none of you do, either. Or the city of Orlando -- Ontario in 2010, where a public employee, a police officer, an S.W.A.T. team member, claimed his Fourth Amendment rights were violated. He worked for the police department. They required texts sent and received on his department-issued pager.
There will be some people who are listening that don't even know pagers used to be able to do that. And that's how fast this information has changed. He had just broken up with his girlfriend, said mean things, was disciplined, said it was a private conversation. But it's on our equipment, and that's the oops.
So the takeaway really is that every employer, whether public or private, should really have a clearly drafted policy, giving employees notice that there's no expectation of privacy on company electronic equipment, whether this be in emails, phone logs, text messages, GPS capabilities, any of that. It's the new normal.
The privacy of the '89 law with regard to addressing privacy concerns under the ECPA, Electronic Communications Privacy Act, were really having to do with maintaining its own email system and assumes the provider's status, the employer is allowed to receive and stop all messages, two types of communications, in transit and stored.
No effect for instant messaging today. Wiretapping is really access without authorization. So we see that in media where somebody is gaining access to somebody else. They're really going to have to have a significant amount of evidence beforehand to have a judge sign off that that's allowed.
So, then we have states who have really upped the ante here, where if somebody logs in as somebody else or creates a second or third account from a fictitious person to bully a classmate, we've seen that kind of prohibition starting to hit state laws, but can't find anything in federal law yet. But a takeaway is, don’t access an employee's website by receiving private information, through a friend, or going through a person on the employee’s friend list.
We're hunting for guidance. When we look at definitions in these activities, we think to ourselves, well, can an employer tell me I can't bring my cell phone to work? That's my right. I can’t find that right anywhere, but we assume that that's our right. I have had employers, especially in the collection agency field, where there is vast amounts of personal data on screens that they tell employees you cannot bring your smartphone, the camera, your cell phone, into the office.
I've been into the oil patch where no photographs are allowed. And that usually means not taking your phone out while you're in places of design and things like that. So we're starting to see some within the bricks and sticks of a building on company time, using equipment, and prohibiting some of those.
I was just as a wedding recently that had a beautiful placard as you came into the place of worship. And it said, please enjoy our nuptial festivities today by your mind's eye only, and not in social media. Please allow the bride and groom to upload their pictures when they see fit. And I thought, okay. Drawing the line from the bride and groom's perception is a new wedding etiquette that seems to be emerging.
Then we've got definitions of social media activities. So when we think in terms of whether you're doing them or not, how many of them have emerged. And while web rings were a big thing many years ago and all but gone now, and we see blogs, and great writing abilities emerge. And more YouTube videos than you can shake a stick at coming online constantly.
And it seems to be in a flux. And that flux, employer restrictions on social media, may be in different forms of a blanket prohibition, or can they prohibit accessing using can equipment, or limit activities during a non-work time in violation of a policy. So we're moving all over the board here. And I recently asked an organization of society of human resource managers how much time you would think an employee should be allowed during the work day to be on social media.
And there was a very interesting discussion that there was no answer to. But I took the position of being -- offering a technical assistance that if it wasn't part of their job description, that only during their break time would they have any availability to that. Lunch hour or on their own time.
And while I got some head-nodding, I think the reality is far from that. The National Labor Relations Board has this law called the National Labor Relations Act. Now, the act, you have to go way back in time to the New Deal, FDR administration. And under the act, you have a right to discuss your wages, benefits, and other terms and conditions of employment, just above the top of that red circle there is what I'm looking at.
So that one law takes that one line, you have the right to discuss your wages, benefits and other terms and conditions of employments, and it's called concerted speech. Now, this is kind of an interesting -- watch this politically, because we’re changing administrations and there may be a change to this board. So let's look at last administration's view of the NLRB. Monitoring employee social networking activities has the potential of creating a chilling effect on the employee’s communication regarding the terms and conditions of employment in violation of what I just read you.
So that was that previous slide. That's 29 USC 157. The chilling effect is the boss is watching, I'm not going to have my concerted speech. On the miracle mile outside of Chicago, I guess in Chicago, back in May of 2011, there was a dealership. And one of the salesmen saw that what was being offered was, in his words, "low-rent," turkey hot dogs and big K cola. And he was unhappy with that. He said how low-rent of us. He got fired, nonunion concerted activity because it involved a discussion among employees about their terms and conditions of employment.
And lo and behold he receives a settlement from them and his job back. So their website, the National Labor Relations Board website, more or less has taken the position with regard to this concerted activity. Now, since I uploaded this, there has been an ESPN reporter who not on her ESPN Twitter account, but on her personal account said something about the president and his supremacy, or related to it.
And forgive me for not knowing the details, but this has had an interesting backlash, because this question comes up once more with regard to whether the press secretary calling for somebody’s termination by a private employer is crossing a line. So more on this. And it's in the news. And as I said earlier, we're in flux with much of this. So, when we think in terms of the NLRB’s protections, I just want to give you the information about what are unprotected activities, personal gripes that don't affect others, spreading false rumors.
But then the NLRB found unlawful restrictions in the right to engage in social media as discipline and discharge and overbroad policies. So they're getting into the weeds here with regard to -- I'm on slide 65 -- termination of employees or employees who complain about their supervisor on Facebook, or termination of employees for posting a YouTube video about safety concerns.
And the fascination with when you start to look at how much of this is out there, it's pretty amazing, because there is an awful lot. This could be a three-hour presentation if I showed you those clips. But some evening when there's nothing on TV, enjoy them on your own time. Their decisions finding social media activities unprotected are employees who vent about conflict with a supervisor but don't involve other employees, employees who criticize management using expletives, and employee who posts pictures of accidents with derogatory comments.
And it goes on and on and on. So, freedoms. Where are they? Well, I think the best place is going back to the twoosh, the perfect tweet. Having some kind of a best practices or an acceptable use policy may in fact be in the wind. In other words, let's add a little bit of etiquette to it. Because on slide 58, Viktor said a society in which everything is recorded will forever tether us to all our actions, making it impossible a practice to escape them.
Without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes very difficult, and there are no second chances. The worst thing you’ve done is the first thing people will know about you. So I had this little gimmick that I would do, especially when I was teaching in colleges and universities to young people about social media. And I would give them an index card and say use your smartphones, laptops, and tablets, anything you have with you and on this index card, write down everything you can about Anthony Wiener.
And I would collect all the cards. And far more than 65% would show me that he wore briefs and not boxers. And it was kind of amazing here how one person who was probably going to be the next mayor of New York -- and why in the middle school if his name was A. Wiener he didn't learn not to post pictures of himself in his underwear is beyond me. But the worst thing he had done was the first thing people found out about him.
I took that piece of information and went to our legal counsel. I said what are good ways to teach people in different affinity groups that may not have the clearest shot to employment, ways to protect themselves? And I did a little research and came up with this notion of be careful. Be discreet, be prepared. It's the same things that my wife and I taught our children as they went off to college, because they don't have common names, and watch their electronic footprints.
And I wanted to get to the legality of it. So when employers base their hiring decisions on race, religion, creed, color, national origin, age, sex, disability, there might be problematic here. Information discovery leaves an employer's to knowledge that would be illegal to use against the applicant in a hiring decision. And discovering an applicant was arrested or using that to disqualify them may in fact be against policy, because anyone could be arrested.
It would be a conviction that someone can hold against you. But legal counsel went so far in saying well, you could say this. Things that you can't ask at an interview. We're all kind of comfortable with that. Things I can't ask. Have you ever been locked up, do you plan to have children, are you married. Those kinds of things are the same things you can't research online.
But what's fascinating is how many of our investigators are finding information on an on-site or in an applicant flow database where more and more of these screen grabs are being collected. So questions to ask when you're using social media, is it valid? Where is this from, who's saying it? Is the information that you're getting predicting job performance, is it job-related, does it have anything to do with a backpack issue?
While there's no laws that are passed yet, there's nothing illegal. Information posted on an internet is considered “public domain”. But that's in quotes because I'm going to bet we will eventually see some case law here in the United States. Many countries already have it. And it opens up organizations to the perception of using protected information.
But I take the position, is it worth it? If I have the supervisor sleuth who is Googling so much information about potential candidates, why not just interview them and get a sense of their soft skills? Because the perception you're getting may be down the wrong rabbit hole. Whether or not there's an off-duty conduct policy or you check one's cyber reputation or advise caution among employees posting things, I think the commonsense realities of social media networking for their employees, while at work, while using equipment, or how it will affect directly on the employer is the commonsense approach.
But, again, this is an etiquette issue. I was at the movies not too long ago. And after paying $13 for my seat, because I'm in bifocals, I was so annoyed that the young person in front of me was texting. And it was glaring in my glasses and I thought, don’t they have a policy here against this kind of inappropriate use of a very bright phone in a dark theater?
And then when the movie started, it was a zero tolerance policy. And I saw the person put the phone away and I thought, well, sometimes the sign works. What's discoverable, if you've been to law school or had somebody go to law school, this is a whole new area that they're having lawyers study about the E-discoverable of just about everything that exists in a keystroke, a backup file on a thumb drive.
And the world has become so transparent with regard to this information that it's phenomenal. The unique problems on slide 74 that talk about networking activities is, I think we've blurred the line between work and personal. There's really no filter or edit. And we're really not sure how many people we're talking to. While some of the dashboard here today tells me that there are 55 people signed in, I know from doing these in the past they’re archived and there may be ten times that many hearing this at the end of five, six, seven months, because of the questions and comments that I get.
So we reach a vast audience. There's an immediate public viewing, quicker, less formal users, less guarded, sometimes more careless with regard to it, the ad libbing approach.
Businessnewsdaily.com, no idea the source, but, 57% of workers believe that mixing personal and professional connections through social media has the potential to cause problems. It isn’t telling me much, but it says it with such authority that I thought, could that be true? And I have no way of finding out, because none of the sources are anywhere with this one post.
Although there are tragic things that have happened. Back in July of 2012, here was a nice Greek triple jumper expelled from the Olympics after posting a racist joke on Twitter. They had a policy about being an athlete. When you sign up for that policy, you have to abide by it. And it was an oops. Although she had practiced for years to have this opportunity to represent her country, it was denied her because of 140 characters.
And on slide 77 we have 2017's internet in a minute. And the fascination of what happens in 60 seconds. The one that immediately caught my attention was that there were 990 swipes on Tinder. That's an awful lot of young people and hormones is all I could think of. I'm not on Tinder, so it makes no difference. But the reality is that $751,000 were spent online.
And when I see that toys R us is filing for bankruptcy this morning, I think of all of the wonderful times shopping there with my children that is now done online. There is a new normal. And do we go back to the way it used to be. And I think the internet is showing us that maybe not.
A new slides here that I want to conclude with that are things that we have found out in the investigative process that I just want to show you. And they will be self-explanatory. And this first one is reputation.com. And I don't mean to belittle them as a company. I'm sure they're a fine company.
But what they say is that they will create and establish an online presence, look better to HR directors, romantic prospects. There's a picture of me when I was the director of human resources at a hospital in Houston. And it's 26 years ago. And I don’t look like that anymore. So I called them to say I'd like to have that taken down.
Oh, yes, Mr. Bontke, we can guarantee it won't pop again for another six months. And that was $6,000. It's still there. You can Google it. I went to Alaska with my family instead. We make our own decisions. How about this one, careerexcuses.com. Bad resume, fired, we will act as your past employer, have operators standing by to give you that great reference you need. Join now.
You'll be able to create a career and work history you see fit. Keep reading to find out more. So my wife and I spent all that money sending our children to nice schools here in Texas. All we needed was an account here. And I can't find any laws against this, unless it's a falsification of a document that somebody's admitting is right. I don't know if we can assume things are right on a document anymore.
Fakeyourjob.com was my favorite one. The main page doesn't tell you what they do. You have to go to the frequently asked questions button and hit that button. The very first fakeyourjob.com frequently asked question, is what you are doing legal? In short, yes, although people find it to be unethical. It's legal as long as you're not trying to defraud the government.
Can I go to jail, if you're doing it for employment or a place to live, no? It goes on and on with disguise your caller ID. Get three reference calls. Here are all of them from the same smartphone. That's 99 cents. I think it's a dollar 99 version will change your voice. Or the burner phone. If you make no outgoing calls and only receive the reference call, you can return them for a full refund.
And it begs the question what is truth? So I want to end with a gimmick. And the gimmick is I'm going to put a paragraph up on the screen. You don't have to read it. I'm out of time. Count how many of the letter F are on the screen and hold that number in your brain. You will possess a truth. You know what you saw. I’ll shut up. You count how many of the letter F as in frank are on the screen.
Hold that number in your head. Don't tell the people who are around you. Everybody have a number? All right. What did you see? One, two, three, four, five, six, or all seven? Kind of amazing, isn’t it? Experience wrong, that was my mistake. I got to use the proofreaders. The reason I use this silly gimmick is a teachable moment, is your perception sometimes your truth?
Sometimes we have to take another look at what we think we know. I think the internet has perpetuated this sad reality that according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, every hour somebody commits a crime because they hate that person. At least eight blacks, three whites, three gays, become a victim because they hate those people.
Last year, 58 crosses were burned as forms of intimidation. I’m going to bet there'll be more next year. And these are all embarrassments for our society. 30% of workers say they've heard colleagues use ethnic or racial slurs. The same number report hearing sexist comments. What can one person do? This is where I look back at history. These were all one individuals, who made life miserable for those around them.
But I'm the eternal optimist. These are all one individuals who made life better. And we all have a teacher that we remember, somebody who gave us constructive criticism or a finger-wagging or told us to do something in a better way. And we respected them because they were looking out for us.
Maybe it's a pay it forward thing. At the Guide Dogs for the Blind in New Jersey, 17 years ago, one of our investigators was given this picture. He's a blind gentleman. And he sent it to me. And it's all these work animals who are lined up. The instructor gives them the command to stay. And then they put this little kitten out in front of them.
I said what am I supposed to learn here? I get a joke saying that cat has the worst damn job in the country and people will chuckle. He says Joe, if one of the dogs moves towards the cat, the dog on either side of them pulls that dog back in line as a reminder, we’re working now. We're not chasing cats. I think that’s the conclusion of what I want to leave with you today, the realities that business necessity really comes first.
And if I'm doing something that will be an attribute towards business necessity, I may be questioned for it. I'm leaving my information here. Feel free to email me if you have no questions at the end of this, or call me. I respond to my own cell phone and my own office phone when I'm at my desk. And I thank you for your time and attention. Peter, are there any questions in the queue?
PETER BERG: Thanks Joe for all that great information and stories, and humor. I think my favorite so far was the amber Alert for common sense. That's fantastic. Marie, can you give instructions for telephone participants?
MARIE: At this time, ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question, simply press star and the number one on your telephone keypad. Again, that is star one.
PETER BERG: All right. While we wait for that, just a reminder for those in the webinar room, you can submit your questions in the chat area. And control M will put your focus for assistive technology users into the chat area. Joe, let me go back here. What if harassment, employee on employee, is taking place outside the workplace through social media? What responsibility, if any, does an employer have as they become aware of that harassment?
So taking place outside the workplace completely on private social media. But it's between two employees and the harassment is based on a protected status. Does the employer have responsibility if they are aware of that taking place?
JOE BONTKE: I believe they do. I believe at that point, because the two people have a relationship -- and it would be the same if they were out for ice and stuff in the evening and something less than appropriate were to happen. You're still held to that standard of what happens at work and the relationship extends to social media.
So it's the modern-day break world of the worldwide web.
PETER BERG: With regard to that. Okay.
JOE BONTKE: And we do have examples of them that have brought that into a complaint. I have yet to see it make a litigation-worthy charge. I have yet to see that happen.
PETER BERG: Okay. And a person wants to know, a question submitted in advance, more and more employers are using social media as a means to attract, you know, applicants. That generation that, you know, doesn't carry cash, uses, you know, their debit card. So what sort of risks do you see employers, you know, possibly encountering when they are using Facebook, or, you know, other social media to attract applicants in terms of, you know, information that they may gather that they don't necessarily want to have regarding a potential applicant?
JOE BONTKE: It seems as if, if I'm always dipping my applicant ladle into the same applicant pool, I'm always going to get the same kind of applicant. So if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten. And that may be worthwhile if I'm so specialized in a particular field. But it may hurt your eventual sense of hiring the same kinds of people.
And we see that as problematic at times when qualifications seem to be secondary, and what's primary is he only likes to hire people he meets at the gym. Well, it's a healthy lifestyle is an important element. It may not be the most important. And is anybody keeping an eye out for that.
So, we're into a real gray area here that I can't honestly say there is some good guidance for. But I go back to the line that general counsel allows me to broadcast. If I can't ask it in an interview, let's stay away from it online. And that seems to be the best boundary to stick with.
PETER BERG: Excellent. Marie, do we have any questions on the telephone at this time?
MARIE: We have a question from Annie.
PETER BERG: All right. Go ahead with your question, please. If your phone is muted, make sure your phone is un-muted and you pick up the handset.
ANNIE: Thank you. Hi. My question is regarding the definition of employee for over 15 employees, it's my understanding that the EEOC comes into effect. But what if you have, say, a nonprofit with volunteers and board members, etc.? Are they counted, you know, in that number?
JOE BONTKE: The quick answer will be some of our laws have 15 or more employees. Title VII, the ADA. The ADEA is going to be 20 employees. And the EPA, Equal Pay Act is one employee. So that’s the short answer. The longer answer is going to be volunteers are not considered employees at all and we would have no jurisdiction over them.
You may have state or local fair employment practice agencies in your state or local municipality that would protect them, but no federal law is counted for reaching those thresholds. So in essence, no jurisdiction for the most part for a small non-for-profit. However, if it's affiliated with federal funding, if it's affiliated with some other entity, if it's a federation of a few, sometimes it becomes a legal question.
So it's not a quick answer. It would be -- need to do a little research on the particulars.
PETER BERG: All right. Thank you for your question. I'm going to check to see if there's any other questions on the phone. Joe, you had talked about information. You talked about what the legal folks will let you say as far as, you know, what you can't ask in an interview, you shouldn't be gathering on a website. But a person wants to know, is that type of information, how is that any different than, you know, someone submitting, you know, a resume with information that may indicate involvement in a particular group or so forth?
I know that early on in my career on my resume I listed an affiliation, some work I had done and awards I had received from a blindness-specific group on my resume that clearly identified me as, you know, being someone that, you know, blind or low vision. So is that any different than, you know, information that an employer may find through social media?
JOE BONTKE: Probably. You know, having a hidden disability for myself and my sister having a mobility impairment, she was bringing her own chair to the interview. She needed to address that outright. I never divulged my dyslexia in an interview. So depending upon the individual and divulging, does the employer have evidence of my connection with an affinity group or a person with disability group, do I have that added protection?
And the answer may in fact be yes if it's out there for everyone to notice or if it's on the resume. Whether or not you need an accommodation is what we've gotten to at the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act. Let's forget about qualifications, let's talk about accommodations. Making that transformative, understanding the letter of the law was the biggest stop forward.
Because now it was any of those systematic parts of the body that you have a history of an impairment, we can seek coverage for a more liberally wide stroke of inclusion. Now it's do I need to be accommodated to carry out the job. And I'm seeing a lot better case law come out of it because of that. Remember, all those mitigating measures and if you had a prosthetic if you could walk you’re no longer protected.
If you were medicated and now you aren't, you aren't protected, that went away with the do-over of the ADAAA. Social media came along at the right time to say let's not stereotype based on the presumption that someone was in an MS150J, therefore, they have the predisposition, genetic makeup, or whatever it is. But it can be a wait and see of our biggest -- second-biggest cadre of charges on our website is going to be disability-related litigation.
So we're still going to court over these.
PETER BERG: Real quick before I get on to the next question, as a follow up, has there been a move -- obviously since the ADA amendments act took effect, the focus on disability is not there as it was previously. Have you seen charges that are more getting into the issue of being qualified, or is it still around the discharge and reasonable accommodation? Where are those charges falling?
JOE BONTKE: It's very, very difficult to say, because you have another group of 70 million of my brothers and sisters who are known as graying baby boomers who are seeing the onset of new-found disabilities. So for the first time, may need to divulge in the workplace in a different way. So it gets a bit skewed here. But I also see the group of people who are educated post-504 of the rehab act, so my millennials and younger, don’t have the same issues that Baby Boomers have, because they were fully integrated.
I was educated in apartheid, Deaf kids in a Deaf school, and blind kids in blind school. My sister wasn't getting into our school because of her wheelchair. The millennials, fully integrated, now their leaders and business decision-makers were educated with people with disabilities. They don't have any issues with it. They learned people-first mindset. So this may, in fact, be a dying problem as soon as my Baby Boomer generation all retires. That sounds hopeful, doesn't it?
PETER BERG: (Laughing) Yes, it does. We won't end there on that high note. We'll continue with some questions. Something popped in my head, I want to follow up with you. I think it's fascinating with the aging of Baby Boomers and, you know, projections on the increase in number of people, you know, being a person with a disability, and what recommendations or what do you talk to employers around that very issue?
Because an employer may have an applicant that is, you know, 25 years old, has known nothing but the ADA. They may have low vision. And during the application, they will come out and say, you know, I have protections under the ADA, I need this particular technology to perform my job. And that same employer may have an employee who, you know, is 60 years old and goes to a supervisor and says to the supervisor, you know, I'm not able to read the screen quite as well as I used to.
I'm having difficulty using the database that I had no problem using a fear years ago. And so how do you talk about this? You know, you may have one end of the spectrum not using reasonable accommodation. And that's obviously not required in requesting an accommodation. And then the other spectrum of, you know, the younger, you know, applicants, employees, that, you know, do use the, you know, ADA language.
JOE BONTKE: And it is an interesting generational divide that rears its head in interesting ways. I have yet to see any studies done on it. There is a professor at Rice University who has some really good YouTube videos delving into it. And I hope she gets the kind of funding that might warrant it, because I’m fascinated by it, being in this line of work for the 20 years here and then 7 years with the Southwest ADA Center.
And, you know, the 27 years has taught me the multitude of affinity groups and how similar problems throughout the groups post-9/11, backlash discrimination against the Muslim/Sikh community opened up my eyes to an array of differences with regard to faith elements. And then add to that the LGBT group that is more recent, where somebody could use their bias -- or maybe bigotry -- that gets blessed by their belief.
And we have a cadre of the other accommodations, the religious accommodations, minimal compromise in business necessity saying I don’t want to work with those people, they're going to hell anyway. Where you think wow, this is a fascinating look at human nature. So, you know, I don't think our group of people with disabilities has a sole lock on how we look at differences, because the uniqueness of all of us wins out at the end.
And I think that's the neat part of it. We all laugh in the same language, I keep telling myself.
PETER BERG: That's right. Speaking of the fine folks at the Southwest ADA Center, we have a question submitted by someone there. Is there anything a person can do about websites holding a person’s info for ransom, for example, Zoom Info offers up info on a person for money? This type of site has a person's info such as age, ethnicity, and perhaps whether or not they have a disability. Is there any sort of remedy in that type of situation?
JOE BONTKE: I've only recently learned about it. And I've yet to see any case law on it. And it seems as if, you know, some form or fashion of the espionage that is happening is outside of my realm. But I do know of a law enforcement entity that was connected with a hospital district that had to pay in Bitcoin to have their servers turned back on. And they had no rhyme or reason to do anything else.
And one of the federal agencies says, we don't know how to fix it. So we're going down another dark web rabbit hole that is the scary part of all of this data that's out there. And, you know, I don't mean to shake an accusatory finger to Equifax, but when I looked at the website, finding out how to apply to get this one year's protection, they wanted a lot of my personal information that I've already not trusted them with.
It's kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater in some respects that I'm fearful of what the next turn of the next shadowy corner will be. And no, I don't know what to do about the ransom issue.
PETER BERG: Great. Going back to technology, and, you know, we had discussions in the past, you know, about the ADA has always required employers to provide reasonable accommodations to applicants, one of the three categories where an employer may need to provide an accommodation if necessary to provide an equal opportunity. What type of discussions or guidance do you provide to employers that are using social media or just online sites in general for applicants to apply for jobs, or to have an opportunity to interact with an employer regarding accessibility of those websites, for persons that use assistive technology or for persons with other types of disabilities?
You know, what type of guidance do you provide in that situation?
JOE BONTKE: Our investigative force is well-versed in looking at how accessible the process is to anybody who's needing an accommodation wherever the internet is involved. So while I'm not expert at all of the elements of what laws are required for accessibility and the internet, I have been very impressed when our investigators -- it's the other side of the house -- have more or less asked for that kind of training or outreach to be able to say these folks have a kiosk at their store that you apply for a job, but it doesn't have a screen reader.
It doesn't have any availability for anybody who has a hearing impairment. And there's a chair in front of it. And they flop to the floor. If you were wheeling up a chair, you couldn't access it. So while I see we still have a ways to go, we're educating our enforcement staff in the leaps and bounds of how this is done correctly.
PETER BERG: Great. Let me check with Marie one more time, see if we have any questions on the telephone at this time.
MARIE: Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question, simply press star one.
PETER BERG: All right. And while we wait to see if anyone else chimes in there, Joe, any concerns or issues where, you know, we obviously see businesses and organizations, employers, using social media to show the type of work that they do, or, you know, to show their employees -- are there any potential issues for employers that use, you know, photographs of, you know, within the workplace, or group activities, or outside the workplace?
And, you know, using those and posting those on social media?
JOE BONTKE: You know, there's a common understanding to get people's permission if it's going to be broadcast for the purposes of commerce that you can't take a picture of -- you know, everybody at the company picnic in their sack races and think it's okay to use them without some kind of a sign-off. But, you know, that's just a commonsense due diligence. There may be some very private people. And one of my children, my son, is in broadcasting. He works with some folks who are a bit concerned about their depiction going out if they don't have makeup on, or if they're not prim and proper in their decorum, because that's their future.
So he has learned there is a new audience divide in different industries. And I know HR groups here in the oil patch who make every effort to depict their diversity in their websites to be able to show that it depicts the Harris County, one of the most diverse parts of the country. Those types of efforts are important. But it gets pandering when you're trying to be overly inclusive, and you're just asking the same person because they use a wheelchair or a walker, to be in every picture.
It seems as if now it's pushing that lever. And it might be overkill. That's just Joe's opinion. And I think there's a fine line of what people are able to realize and, you know, where there’s a good effort and where there's no effort at all. It's a hard one to answer, though.
PETER BERG: I appreciate your effort at addressing it. We are just about at the bottom of the hour. I want to thank Joe immensely for his time, not just the 90 plus minutes that he has spent with us here today, but the time in preparing and getting his presentation to us. So that could be prepared for the platform. So, Joe, thank you very much for all of your time. As a reminder, we have our next session coming up Tuesday, October 17th.
It is not a cooking show, despite the time. But this is titled Parsley or Cilantro, Making Sure Your ADA Self-evaluation and Transition Plan Are Seasoned with the Right Ingredients. So I hope that you will join us in that session, where we have the presentation on Title II self-evaluation and transition plans. You can get information on registered for that session by visiting ADA-audio.org.
Today's session has been recorded. And the audio recording will be up within the next 24 hours. And an edited transcript of today’s session will be available within ten business days.
Again, thank you very much to Joe for his presentation. Thank you to all of you for joining us today. Without you, we wouldn't be able to do these sessions. Please complete your evaluations of today’s session. We use that information to guide future session topics. So would appreciate you taking the time to go ahead and complete those. So that is the end of today's ADA audio conference session. We look forward to seeing you all in October. And good day.
JOE BONTKE: Thanks a lot, Peter. Bye-bye.
OPERATOR: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.