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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.'"
Shouldn't an employer have the right to fire a worker who wastes too much time online?
And it's probably not a cover if you aren't a state government employee! It sounds like the judge applied definitions of "reasonable private use of public property" from the civil service rules of New York to a penalty against a civil service employee.
I think it would be fairly uncomfortable working for a company that wants to fire you. Maybe he should find a job where they allow a little more slack in their internet usage policies.
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If you try that at a real company (i.e. not a state job) and your ass is gone. Surfing for hours on the net is not acceptable anymore than talking on the phone with your girlfriend for hours. With the logic of this ruling.. wouldn't it be ok to surf porn? Because you can talk on the phone with one of those 900 numbers. Bottom line is this... a company is paying you to do a job and thats it. Now if your job is to surf the net, then I guess you're ok :)
http://religiousfreaks.com/That is something most employers are doing. When hired, the human resources officer says your gaurenteed 15 minutes of paid break time for every 4 hours, gaurenteed by federal law. But as soon as the HR person is gone, the manager of the department says you don't get any breaks. It is like the legal department tells the left hand one thing, and the right hand another. Just as long as the company prints the policy on paper, they can do anything in practice. Who's going to risk a job over two 15 minute breaks?
It reminds me of a job I had before college, in a factory. There were OSHA posters everywhere about what the law required. But nobody did it the OSHA way, unless there was an inspection. It was done the way the person signing the check wanted. I saw people get fired for complaining about not wanting to do a job an unsafe way. I only stayed there a year, but I did notice many white workers who were paid $12-13 an hour were being replaced with mexicans who spoke broken english and one told me he was paid $7 an hour. The mexicans didn't give a crap about OSHA. How does that translate to IT? Well, I guess it is the equivelent of watching your job go to India.
We gotta do it the way the company owner wants, or he'll relocate out of the USA and there will be no jobs. What alternative is there?
Plus, if you bring a suit against your employer and win, you'll inevitably be fired a week later for greatly publicized gross incompetance. They'll always find something.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Wow. Getting fired for surfing would be retarded. People that can multitask and look at say, CNN, while on the phone is not something that should be case for termination.
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What if you terminate the employee for not getting their work done? Does it really matter whether they are not getting it done because they are browsing the web or because they are reading a novel or talking to the guy in the next cube for 5 hours a day? It certainly sounds silly to say you fired someone just for browsing the web, but when you can show it has tangible effects on their output.. well... that is quite a different story.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
What if you terminate the employee for not getting their work done?
It does seem rather obvious, doesn't it? I suppose all this business about unrestricted employee Internet access harming businesses indicates how poorly most companies are managed.
Newspaper, book, goofing off on Slashdot, crossword puzzles, phone gossip, water cooler loitering. The bottom line ought to be: are you getting your work done, or not? Hell, plenty of people don't goof off in tangible way, but still manage to waste hours every day and avoid getting work finished. I've also encountered plenty of folks who "work" 50 hour weeks but manage to get almost nothing done.
It seems like managing for outcomes is a helluva lot easier, too. If you're spending time as a manager trying to figure out if your employees are surfing the Web, that's time you could be spending checking your employees' actual work output.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Note that it doesn't appear that this ruling will impact anyone outside of the particular work situation/contract that the employee was hired under.
In other words, it's very doubtful that this ruling applies to you.
yup, and it looks like, but the article isn't clear, that the judge is merely interpreting company policy to say it extends to web surfing as well.
not a big deal
Your suggestion to simply "remove all web browsers" is about as sensible as removing the telephone from an employee's desk or office, citing the fact that "Many of you don't really need one to get your job done."
It could probably be done, but it creates a hostile work environment. People expect to be able to check their personal email during lunch breaks and so forth, and these things usually require web access. Furthermore, it's increasingly difficult to make a determination that "employee X never needs Internet access". What if their boss suddenly asks them to "find me some documentation on how this machine is disassembled", or maybe "get me some price quotes on a new air compressor"? Does it makes sense to limit them to making phone calls from numbers they can find in the phone book, and talking to a few salespeople to find out "the best possible price"? If they had Internet access, a few searches on a search engine could yield them much better results.
Even your secretaries/administrative assistants (who many bosses think do nothing with the Internet besides play online games and waste time chatting) often save a company money when they realize they can use the net to get better pricing on toner or ink cartridge refills, paper, and other office supplies than what they've always gotten through their normal vendors. And if your company still uses a travel agent to book flights - shame on them. Give your employees access to the airline web sites and car rental/hotel chain sites, and let them take care of those things themselves!
Bottom line: Giving people more tools to accomplish tasks is never a "bad" thing. The issues only come about when poor management allows employees to waste too much time. It doesn't really matter if we're talking about the Internet, trips to the water cooler, or reading books.
/tmp and /var/tmp are out of bounds, if you step in them you're It.
I'll tell ya what - when you're on my LAN, using my Computer, and my Internet connection - then I tell YOU what YOU can and can not do. If you don't like it, then use YOUR LAN, YOUR Computer, and YOUR Internet connection...
When I came on the scene - I had a slow, saturated T1 with people complaining all the time. A couple days analysis and I discovered that all the bandwidth was going to bullshit - music, shopping, news, downloading screen savers/ringtones, etc. So I set up DansGuardian and blocked everything but what we decided to allow. Now I have a T1 line that's not saturated, and get's about 50% use with 75% peaks (so I'm looking at going to a fractional to save some $$$).
Yep - I'm the "Company Dick", people hate me, but the boss is happy that I've cut costs and have people working in the office... Even better - people get their shit done during the day, so once they got with the program, they were able to get more work done and go home on time - so they're slowly starting to come around too... And nope, no one quit...
I have the same policy with email - no personal use. We whitelist all the known addresses/domains that we use for business, and let the rest hit the spam filters. We monitor the spam filters daily to make sure nothing either slips by or gets caught unnecessarially, and when we discover a bizillion messages that have nothing to do with business - we blacklist that address - we don't bounce anything, just blackhole it... that problem takes care of itself after a day or so and some "Test messages"... Requests to open up those addresses are summarially ignored.
Yep - I'm the company dick, but my email server isn't overloaded with a lot of shit, and I don't need to increase the capacity to handle a bunch of non-business crap.
My company cell phones - no personal use. I monitor all the #'s and match against known personal numbers/known business #'s. All the rest are looked at statistically to see if there's high usage. If there is, and it's not business related - I charge the employee back.... Yep, I'm the company dick, but I saved this company hundreds of thousands of minutes last year on our cell bill.
And yep - we DISCLOSE everything we do at the time of hire - employee is free to not accept the agreement, and we just won't hire them. If they do accept it, then I expect, require, and demand that they hold up their end of the bargain or I'll charge back just like I said I would. Once the first few chargebacks go out, people get the message pretty quickly and the shit stops.
If you want to get personal calls at work - carry your own damn cell phone. But if that affects the time that you are to put in for this company - we'll fire your ass, so keep it short and sweet and only when you need to. None of that all day SMS/IM crap about what you plan to do after work, blah blah blah...
I've had a couple people go to court, try to challenge it, but hey, we're employment at will, not some bullshit governmental shop so they get no where with it once we pull out the copy of the agreement they signed...
My advice: Grow up. Be professional. When you're at work - try WORKING for a change.
(and no, I'm not doing this from work...)
If the contract allows surfing the web on breaks AND this employee is guilty of doing nothing but surfing on breaks, then he would be guilty of NOTHING. But the AC says the judge is right. Since the judge ruled that the employee should be reprimanded, the AC would have us believe that the judge has correctly ruled that the employee should be reprimanded for doing nothing wrong. So which is it? Is the judge abusing the poor, innocent civil servant? Or do you admit that the person WAS doing something against the rules and the real argument is what punishment is appropriate. In LogicLand, you can't have it both ways.
David
Bit of a pyrrhic victory when so many "employed" people need to have 3 jobs just so they can feed themselves, isn't it ?
Oh noes!! What will we ever do without the web?
Damn I feel old. I remember when we actually went to work to work, not surf. If there was anything on your screen that didn't directly relate to what you were working on, you got in trouble. No wonder it seems that productivity is down everywhere I look.
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
Ofcourse. Anyone who's got a complaint against a draconian office policy must be a whiner. Why not just label anyone who disagrees with you at all as a 'whiner.' You should also try the grade school favorite, "I know you are, but what am I?" That one's a real winner too.
Yea, and technology/the world has also changed since 1995. Making your employees work in pre-1995 conditions isn't likely to improve your business. You might as well argue that since people used to get by just fine without electricity and plumbing, that it's fine to take those amenities away as well.
Umm... do you know what whitelists are? Pre-compiled/custom whitelists aren't going to list every website that one might legitimately visit at work. The GP's example of municiple government websites for handling traffic tickets are not likely to be on any whitelists. You simply can't predict what sites your employees are going to legitimately need to access. That's why he wrote "good luck identifing all those sites."
For someone so cocky you sure aren't very good at simple reasoning. Why do you think businesses pay their employees? It's because they need those employees to work there. It's better for them to pay the employees to work, than it is to not pay them and not get the work done. An office isn't like a burger joint. Most individuals are assigned specific tasks and workloads are balanced so that everyone has a reasonable amount of work to do in an allotted amount of time. If an employee has to take time off work, it's not a simple matter of simply having someone else coming in to work for him. Sometimes that person is the only one who can complete the work assigned to him.
As such, it's much better to let the employee spend an hour or so taking care of things outside of work (which must be done during normal business hours) and have him actually complete his work for that day (which is his responsibility if he chooses to come in to work that day rather than take the day off), than it is to simply let the work get put off till another day. If you have ever been in a professional working environment where each individual has his own set of responsibilities requiring a specialized set of skills, then this should all be self-evident.