How To Lose Your Job, Thanks To The Internet

The New York Times has up an article discussing the trend of employers tracking the 'free time' activities of their employees via their web presence. "When they do go off the clock and off the corporate network, how they spend their private time should be of no concern to their employer, even if the Internet, by its nature, makes some off-the-job activities more visible to more people than was previously possible. In the absence of strong protections for employees, poorly chosen words or even a single photograph posted online in one's off-hours can have career-altering consequences." The piece likens this activity to the 'Sociological Department' that the Ford Company ran to monitor the home lives of their workers. Overstatement, or the corp as Big Brother?

Comments

Hmmm....

[andy666]

Yeah this internet thing might end up having some impact on the world....

Re:Hmmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah this internet thing might end up having some impact on the world....

A paragraph from the cited article:

Employment law in most states provides little protection to workers who are punished for their online postings, said George Lenard, an employment lawyer at Harris Dowell Fisher & Harris in St. Louis. The main exceptions are workers who are covered by collective bargaining agreements or by special protections for public-sector employees; members of these groups can be dismissed only "for cause." The rest of us are "at will" employees, holding on to our jobs only at the whim of our employers, and thus vulnerable.

.

And for this, you can thank those who deride unions as "corrupt organizations, whose sole purpose was to aggrandize the union bosses".

Yes, the statement may be true in some cases, but they did protect their covered employees from the "at will" horseshit. I worked for a company whose new management put the employee manual online on the intranet. Cute trick -- before you could look at what the provisions were, you had to click on a box following a statement saying that you agreed that you were an "at will" employee and could be dismissed at any time for any reason.

Union employees could have told the company to stick the intranet up their asses and to provide a written, dated statement of employee rights and responsibilities.

Most of you nerds should keep in ming that you're on call 24/7 or are working 50 to 60 hour weeks because those fine folks in your parents' generation who fought bloody battles for the 40-hour work week have been cast aside as "productivity-robbing parasites".

As an exercise, everyone in an "exempt" position should divide their yearly salary by the appropriate number to see what their actual hourly wage is.

I once was awarded a check large enough to be worth $500 after taxes for work "above and beyond" on a certain project. It felt nice until I added up the extra hours I'd put in and found out the cocksucking bastards had gotten me to work for about five dollars an hour.

Goddamned self-serving pricks.

Whoa

[chanrobi]

So posting those drunken, pot smoking pics of myself on a publicly viewable online source (e.x facebook) might not be a good idea? That's news to me.

Re:Whoa

[phantomcircuit]

The real problem isn't that you post the pictures of yourself, it is that one of your "friends" posted them.

Not much is new here.

[gnutoo]

Fascism is older than the internet. Witch hunts are older than that. What you see is a bunch of companies that think they are so powerful that they can tell you to do and think as they say, 24/7. With government granted franchises, rubber stamped consolidation and bad joke anti-trust enforcement big company perception is not that far from reality. Shutting down online expression is both an exercise and enhancer of corporate power, just as book burning and other forms of censorship have been.

If your company is like this, do yourself a favor and quit.

Re:Not much is new here.

[Snooby2008]

I think the main problem is that we can't really separate personal opinions from business ones.

Freedom of speech is a nice thing, but in real word people don't say to employers what they think if it means they lose their jobs. Goverment mostly protects citizens being harassed by goverment itself, but it does very little if private citizen limits other persons freedom of speech or goverments agencies as employer do it.

Or lets phrase that again. Yes, anyone can say anything and freedom of speech is almost without limits. But no law guarantees using that right won't have consequences like losing your job or business. On private or public sector.

And thats the fundamental problem of political rights. If they don't protect people who exercise them economically too, they are just laws that state 'you can do this or that - if you can afford it'.

In real world it means that if you can't afford it, you have to give away your rights. Even those protected in name by constitutions. So actually, freedom of speech for example, knows bounds.

Fundamentals question is then, shouldn't political rights be also economical rights?
Shouldn't they be if they can't be separated in real world?

What are those rights that can't be taken away, but you can't afford to exercise? They are no rights at all far as I can tell.

Re:Not much is new here.

[Anonymous Coward]

A senator who supports homosexual relations with under aged teens or preteens wouldn't stand for a minute in a serious election So one who supports heterosexual relations would be okay?
I don't think I want you to be allowed to vote.

Re:You can still make an effort

[Anonymous Coward]

Ed Zantolak! Is that you!!! Hey, I got some top notch colombian shit for new years. I know you have a nose like a vacuum cleaner, so come on over. There's gonna be some male strippers too... remember that time in San Francisco? AIDS ruined everything man.

Re:Well, no kidding!

[MeNeXT]

You don't deserve squat -- that's why you get nothing but money for your time. You work is appreciated, but the intelectual property isn't yours, and the risk wasn't yours, and the value-rewards won't be yours. The clients aren't yours, the company isn't yours. There's an enormous risk in starting your own business, and it's a gigantic under-taking to maintain any business. Being a cog in the machine is worth the grease, and little more.

And we wonder where loyalty went? With this attitude you'll get the employees you deserve.

Where to draw the line, though?

[Token_Internet_Girl]

I want to quote this first:

If you do something in public in your own time, it can and will affect your employment and is of concern to your employer. No bank wants an employee that's a convicted fraudster. No school wants teachers who are porn stars. No police force wants an ex-con as an officer. The issue isn't whether you conduct these activities in your own time or not, or if the Internet was used. The issue is that you're in a trusted position, and that your employer may have the right to terminate your employment if they perceive a conflict of interest, or if something you've done or are doing in your spare time means you can't effectively do your job.

I agree that "conflicts of interests" as mentioned above do have a right to be known to employers. However, when does this stop becoming an genuine effort to root out the so-called "stripper teacher," and become an threadbare excuse to fire someone for lack of conformity? Let me illustrate. I am always 110% work appropriate when I am on the job, however in my off hours I wear alot of piercings, I show tattoos, I like to go out and have drinks and hang with friends. There is, with today's digital camera boom, a good chance pictures will be taken of these activities in my off time. Now, if the place I work for is generally church going, khaki and polo button down straight edge family types, they might absolutely abhor my personal life, even though I don't bring it to work. Now the issue becomes, "if one worker doesn't fit the company image in and out of work, cut him loose." Can you see how easy the line between business interest and privacy can get blurred and abused? It feels like a door for socialized work places(sans government). Maybe I make a slightly paranoid case, but self expression is highly important to me; I'd hate to live half a life for fear of losing my job.