Judge Rules in Favor of Websurfing at Work

MirrororriM writes "According MSNBC article, a judge has ruled in favor of a worker that was repeatedly warned for surfing the internet on company time. Only a "reprimand" is a fitting punishment - not termination. From the article: 'It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work.'"

Comments

Simple Fix

[MudButt]

repeatedly warned for surfing the internet on company time

If this was a problem, why in the world didn't they simply block outbound port 80 from the local NAT address (192.168.0.dumbass-that-won't-get-to-work) -> 255.255.255.255/0?

You can do this type of thing on any SOHO firewall, surely they had this ability.

Re:Simple Fix

[El Cubano]

If this was a problem, why in the world didn't they simply block outbound port 80 from the local NAT address (192.168.0.dumbass-that-won't-get-to-work) -> 255.255.255.255/0?

Another possibility if your employee workstations run any flavor of Linux or BSD is to simply remove all the web browsers. Seriously. Unless your company uses apps that can only be access via the web (which I know is many nowadays), there is no need for most employees to have web browsers.

Another possibility is to block all web traffic except through a proxy. Make the proxy authenticate. Use the proxy to allow intranet-only traffic for those people that don't need access to the public Internet.

Any moderately-sized business should be able to accomplish this. Given that the guy in question was a city employee, I would say that the city government should invest in some decent IT people.

Not valid outside NY

[tepples]

You won't be able to use this as binding precedent against an employer unless you live in New York. The cost of bringing a wrongful termination suit to establish a corresponding precedent in your jurisdiction may be more than you can afford. Worse yet, employment laws tend to vary greatly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Working for City/State is different

[Brix Braxton]

Actually - the original article referred to a city/state employee (no mention of that in the quote) - that's relevent because if you've ever worked for the government - you'll know that it's not as simple to fire a person. Most of us work in an "employment at will" environment - where they don't need to establish a good reason to fire. -Mike

Solitaire=internet?

[danmart]

According to the article: "The ruling came after Mayor Michael Bloomberg fired a worker in the city's legislative office in Albany earlier this year after he saw the man playing a game of solitaire on his computer." What a stupid case. Since when is a game of solitaire "providing a combination of communication and information"? I can see if the guy was researching something online but he was goofing off.

Not valid inside NY too.

[Tired_Blood]

This will not even apply to most NY workers, either.

NY happens to be one of those states where an employer can fire you for any reason ("Employment at will"), except for 8 very specific circumstances (Here's the list of exceptions).

Given that, I guess the critical point to this case was that the employer was the Dept of Education: a public sector job.

Albany's culture of "pay to play", indeed. :)

Re:Honestly

[HTH NE1]

Shouldn't an employer have the right to fire a worker who wastes too much time online?

Unfortunately the system logging net usage does not attempt to correlate it to compiler usage, so it doesn't show that you were surfing while waiting for a 15 minute build and link to complete because a header file used by only 21% of the code had to be touched and you need the resulting binary to do testing.