Hospitality industry deals with Rate My Boss website
A website created by a union allowing workers to review their employers might create some defamation issues.
The Rate My Boss website, set up by United Voice allows users to give bosses a rating out of five stars, and share their experiences and frustrations.
Some reviews are complementary, praising bosses for being "caring and respectful" and providing a "motivational place to work".
But others are less than complimentary and come close to defamation.
Like for example the anonymous review of a Ballarat restaurant which accused it of "dodgy accounting and under the table deals with local authorities keep this place in business. Chronic underpayment of staff wages".
University of Western Australia law school senior lecturer Michael Douglas said Rate My Boss, like so many other online platforms, had the potential for defamation.
He said businesses could potentially potentially sue Rate My Boss and the individual who wrote the review, if they were small enough for the owners to be personally identified.
The question, he said, was whether venue owners would take action.
"So your rating will be defamatory if it disparages your boss, or causes other people to dislike him or her, or ridicule him or her, or to subject them to contempt,” Mr Douglas told the ABC.
"Even if you talk badly about a boss, even if you're justified in talking badly, there's potential for the boss to come after you with defamation law, but it's another question whether the boss will succeed."
“A practical difficulty in going after an individual who posted the review is that sometimes people don't identify themselves on the internet.
"So for practical purposes it may be strategically desirable for Rate My Boss itself to be subject to defamation proceedings."
Brett Edgington, secretary of the Ballarat Trades and Labour Council, an affiliate of United Voice, who has been overseeing the rollout of Rate My Boss in Ballarat, said anonymous reviews displayed on the website were moderated. Also, users had to log in through their social media profiles.
Leon Getler 1st March 2018.
