Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Wow... cool!
Funnypics
I think around 99% of /.'s have been warned of this. Some of us even signing "company papers" indicating immediate termination to anyone caught surfing.
On the other hand, most companies also have policies against spending too much company time on personal phone calls. and on the other hand, oh damn i'm out of hands. :(
Check out my women's designer clothing store.
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.
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.
Masturbating in the conference room can't be far off! I'll get my job back yet, you bastards!
Tomorrow - the PRON!
"Uncomfortable working environment" my ass - HR - you're goin' DOWN. Um - to coin a phrase.
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
www.wildpad.com
I once read a book by an anally retentive time management consultant. Yes, that was his job. He would always have his watch set 3 minutes fast to "be ahead of the world", and would always make todo lists, and would always be doing something while waiting, and all that jazz.
The most ironic thing was that he said that he encouraged his employees to bring puzzles, books, needlepoint, or whatever they wanted to occupy their time when they were done with their work.
Why? Well, because people will stretch a project until the deadline or miss the deadline completely. By having a carrot in front of them saying "I can goof off when I'm done with this", he was able to tell when they were done with their tasks, and assign them a new one. He got more work out of these people by encouraging them to goof off than not.
Its just as irrational to assume that 100% of ones working time is going to be 100% productive work. Its more on the order of 10% to maybe 30% depending on the kind of work. Also, for a lot of white-collar and professional/skilled labor people, they do things and think about things outside of their work that helps them do better work.
How many slashdotters out there have private projects or even outside of work computing interests if you work on computers for a living? Doesn't this stuff help you at your job? If your job encouraged private projects, as Google does, do you think your job would be more fulfilling and productive?
Shouldn't an employer have the right to fire a worker who wastes too much time online?
Sure, but time online should not be treated any differently to time spent on the phone or reading a newspaper. Seems perfectly sensible to me. That's what the judge is saying. Beats me why so many folks think we need special rules and regulations whenever THE INTERNET is involved.
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.
Unfortunately, the only people who will read this article are those who are surfing the web at work. The people too afraid to surf the web will never hear the liberating news.
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?
A "real" company accepts that their workers may need to make personal calls, look up info on the internet and do some reading.
As long as employees get their work done and don't blow company resources, there is no harm in it. In fact, it probably helps keep morale up.
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
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.
This is not my sig.
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.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
My boss just came over as I was reading this and asked what I was doing. Then I told him to shove it because he can't fire me for surfing the web. Instead he fired me for telling him to shove it. Damn it.
Can I bum a sig?
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
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.
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...)