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NASA Employee Suspended For Blogging At Work
BobJacobsen writes "FCW has an article about a NASA employee that was suspended for blogging on government time. Seems the unnamed employee's 'politically partisan' blog entries were a violation of the Hatch Act. The article ends with a chilling quote from the government's Special Counsel in the case: 'Today, modern office technology multiplies the opportunities for employees to abuse their positions and — as in this serious case — to be penalized, even removed from their job, with just a few clicks of a mouse.'" Thing is, he was soliciting campaign donations and writing partisan stuff.
People have been fired for not doing what they were supposed to do. People can get fired by solving crosswords all day and do nothing else.
There often however is an unfair difference between surfing Playboy and reading the Playboy magazine during the office hours. One is easier to detect and prove then the other. It will be used often as an excuse to fire people, because prove is so much easier to get.
At least In Belgium you need a valid reason before you fire somebody without having to pay weeks or months salary, so they will need this proof. People drinking coffee and having cigarette breaks all the time are much less likely to get fired on the spot.
It has to be said that many companies in Belgium will do the firing of people in several steps. Vocal warning, 2 or thre written warnings, firing the person.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I know the folks who maintain our work's various policies and get brought in when discussing the computer-related ones. Typically policies are in place so that when a person's behavior (in person or online) get out of hand, they can point to a policy and say "you need to change or you'll be let go".
One specific to blogging appeared, with the usual wording about appropriate use of our company's name and so on (I think they wanted public affairs involved any time the name was mentioned in a blog). I came up with a list of obvious problems it raised, there was an outbreak of common sense, and all blogging language was removed.
Personally I feel that policies shouldn't be specific to online behavior if at all possible. Instead it's best to remain neutral to the form of communication and shape policies around it. For example, if we have a policy against hate speech, I wouldn't want to see employees writing hate speech on their blogs while they're at work (we let employees get online during breaks as long as it doesn't interfere with their work). What they do with their own time at home, of course, should generally be their own business.
A more important issue is what this says about the bloat and inefficiency at NASA. If an employee can spend years working on their blog at work, it is because they are not being given enough real work to do.
There was one fellow, well known back then, who deliberately tried to get people he didn't agree with shut up by emailing the sites near the end of their posting path and asking "innocent" questions about whether the company had filed the cost of their Usenet connections as campaign contributions. Given that Usenet at this time was still pretty underground, often run by network admins on spare machines, this had the potential for causing a lot of fuss and of course completely blew the unwritten "Usenet stays on Usenet" rule out of the water. He was completely dumbfounded by the response he got and went on a years-long campaign against the evil Usenet cabal who were allegedly trying to shut HIM up. I don't know if he ever understood what the problem was.
It is critical that the Civil Service function between changes in administration. If a new President came in and fired everyone to give overpaid jobs to the "friends and family plan" for the party and his supporters, you'd have a completely inept government, instead of our mostly inept one.
These days, we take for granted that the Civil Servants are employees doing a job, not appointees serving as the pleasure of the President, but understand how difficult it was to arrive there. Until Social Security and the SSA, and the IRS and it's paperwork, people didn't have "careers" the way we do now, you showed up, worked, got paid at the end of the day/week depending on the type of employee.
Right now, we don't have masses of Civil Servants doing political work or losing their job. The Hatch Act was part of creating that environment. The "excesses of it," obviously someone blogging on their lunch hour doesn't seem to be what was envisioned when they wanted to stop party bosses from filling a government secretarial pool with their cronies and cranking out letters from there, seem draconian. However, the alternative was real... and not useful to have good government.
Nice attitude, there, eh?
Perhaps you failed to actually read what I said before deciding it was worth replying with such profanity. I rather specifically said that I was talking about stuff *NOT* done on government time and equipment. From other posts, it seems like we were being held to the pre-1993 rules; I don't know why. Of course, about 20 years of my time was pre-1993, so that would have made "sense" then.
You also apparently have trouble with English comprehension in that I rather explicitly referred to the "ethics" training in general, rather than solely to the Hatch act stuff, which was just one part. For example, the "ethics training" was full of details about what the exact penalties for various things were.
Perhaps your sense of ethics depends on what the penalties are. Mine doesn't.
My notion of ethics also doesn't have monetary cutoffs saying that it is fine to accept a gift of $24, but unethical to accept one of $26. That's a distinction of law - not of ethics. But it was part of our "ethics training".
One of my "favorites" early in my career was the conclusion that the combination of several "ethics" laws required me to limit my work to things far below my best capabilities, which seemed pretty unethical to me. Not worth elaborating the details. (The short form is that I was required to work according to my job description, which was required to match my grade, which was limited by time in service, even though I could do work several levels higher). Me and my boss both agreed that this was silly (and unethical), so we just ignored it, but that was the "official" position from the personnell office.
I suppose that since you think it is bullshit to claim that laws and ethics don't always match perfectly, you must agree that it would have been ethical for me to sit on my ass 3/4 of the time after I had finished everything that my job description said I was capable of.
Oh, that's not what you meant? Then perhaps you ought to be a little less quick with the profanity-laced judgments.