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Emergency Dispatcher Fired For Facebook Drug Joke
kaptink writes "Dana Kuchler, a 21-year veteran of the West Allis Dispatch Department, was fired from her job for making jokes on her Facebook page about taking drugs. She appealed to an arbitrator, claiming the Facebook post was a joke, pointing out she had written 'ha' in it, and noting that urine and hair samples tested negative for drugs. The arbitrator said she should be entitled to go back to work after a 30-day suspension, but the City of West Allis complained that was not appropriate. Is posting bad jokes on Facebook a justifiable reason to give someone the boot?"
Probably not, but by the time it's sorted she'll be bankrupt
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1. Enjoy your job
2. Make lots of money
3. Work within the law
Choose any two.
Maybe they had other reasons, but needed an excuse to lay her off?
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
Seriously I understand from a business point the reason. But that doesn't make it right.
Kinda along the lines of no bathroom breaks, mandatory overtime without compensation, and your everyday harassment from bosses.
It always seems like when a company goes too far to try to limit negative publicity all they get is a mountain of bad press.
Sounds like the excuse to fire someone whom they could replace with someone a lot cheaper/less benefits due to years of service....
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
"social networking sites"
"private"
Yeah?
Yes, private in the same sense as if you were to decide to go to a bar and have a few drinks with your friends while not working it would still be a "private" event in the sense that her employer would have little grounds for firing you even using the "but anyone could see him/her in the bar and we don't condone binge drinking here! We have to protect our corporate image!" argument. Once you're off the clock it is your private time to do with as you please (unless you're getting paid to be on call).
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
You know, we wouldn't even have this problem if we didn't try to prohibit Americans from so many things...
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
With Facebook's constant and behind-the-back changes to make more and more things public by default, it'll be a question of time until somebody gets fired because they posted something for their friends (not including anybody from work), yet people (incl. employment-related) they had never intended to see the message did see it and used it against the poster.
Personally I hate the fact, that I have to keep screening my privacy settings just in case they fucked around with something again and changed it to "Everybody".
As long as your physical performance on the job isn't affected, your employer should have no right to use what you do outside of work hours against you, unless they're paying you to be on-call (and even then, there should be limits).
End of story.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
If you take the question as: "Is posting snarky content on Facebook about evading drugs testing sufficient grounds to disqualify you from your job, and hence set you up for justifiable dismissal?", the answer is obviously: "No.".
If you take the question as: "Is posting snarky content on Facebook about evading drugs testing on part of an emergency dispatcher sufficient ground to disqualify said dispatcher from her job", the answer would shift to: "Probably not".
However, if you were to take the question as: "Suppose you are a manager in charge of emergency services. Suppose you catch one of your employees, in a fairly critical position too, writing snarky stuff on Facebook about evading drugs testing. Is that a risk to you? Would it make YOU look bad if she did anything wrong in her job (however unrelated to actual substance abuse)?", then the answer is a definite: "Yes". For that reason said manager will face the choice of (a) actually looking into the matter, forming a personal judgement, and exposing himself and his career tot potential damage just to be fair to an employee or (b) simply firing her and getting a replacement. Which option do you think would make more sense from a CYA perspective and would also make said manager look good, competent, ruthless, and dedicated?
There are no bonus points for coming up with answer (b). So that particular dispatcher is hereby dispatched. Such is the power of new electronic media, classical all-American CYA considerations, and age-old guilt-by-association thinking.
Link to webform email City Attorney Scott Post Phone #: (414) 302-8450
Link to webform email Mayor Dan Devine Phone #: (414) 302-8290
Link to webform email Human Resources director Audrey Key Phone #: (414) 302-8292
I'm emailing the Mayor a picture of Kim Jong-il.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
Think before you post online, whichever site or mailing list. Too many people post without thinking.
Seriously, should I have to do this ? And when I make a joke in public to one of my friends should I first glance over my shoulder to see if there's some HR loon or middle manager stalking me who could use a joke as an excuse to fire me ? That's not the kind of society I want to live in. (It's also in fact NOT the society I live in because luckily I happen to live in a country with decent social protections and unions.) This is the sort of thing we used reproach the USSR for : peoples lives being destroyed because they get reported for saying the "wrong things" without recourse.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Safe from danger? We are talking about emergency services, not your personal nanny. These agencies are a reactive service, not a proactive service. Sure, some violent acts might be discovered in-progress or just prior, but that does not occur very often.
Each person is responsible for their own safety.
Arbitration in the US is binding. They can huff and puff and try to blow the decision down, but they are going to lose.
Either she gets her job back or they end up paying her not to do her job.
whether it is justifiable or not. Anyone who uses facebook and thinks that they are anonymous or safe (from someone dobbing them in) is an idiot.
The article is pretty vague, just mentions she claimed to be addicted to a few prescription meds amoungst other things. Problem is, is that all she did? Or did she make a comment like that while attached to a photo of her in her city employee work uniform while holding some prescription bottles? If it's just the joke a didn't really show what her job was then I don't see why she was fired. If she made that joke while making it obvious that she works for the city then its a whole other can of worms. Like any job, when your in your uniform you are considered a reflection of your company and must always act it, and if she was in uniform (in a picture) with this joke then she is a very poor reflection of her job and discipline actions should very well be expected. Just like in other job.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
Don't use the goddamned Facebook.
What's so hard about it?
Does that mean a Coca-Cola employee could be fired because they always buy lunch at Taco Bell and joke about hating the taste of Diet Coke? Does that mean I could be fired from the hotel where I work because I stayed at a Hilton and it was reported that I said Hiltons are much nicer? What if I posted these on a Myspace page? A twitter page? In a privately-visible Facebook entry? Where is the line drawn? Are my first-amendment rights applicable?
This is a non issue. The arbiter ruled. The person has to go back to work after 30 days.
Sanity prevailed.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
On the one hand, they tried to remove an employee in a critical job who had been linked - via a Facebook comment - to drugs. On the other hand, they tried to remove an experienced employee working in a critical job who had submitted to and passed their drug tests. Who would they replace her with? A less experienced dispatcher who talks about drug addiction in bars and at home but not on Facebook?
Look, if you don't want your job, just quit and go do something you like. Don't troll your employer into firing you, then drag lawyers into it. The only winners there are the lawyers, and that makes Baby Jesus strangle a kitten.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Why oh why do people use their real names on this Net we call Inter? It just isn't worth the potential aggravation.
Why people use their real names:
Section 4.1 of Facebook terms and conditions:
-- Terry
You know, we wouldn't even have this problem if we didn't try to prohibit Americans from so many things...
We brought this on ourselves with our own rhetoric (not just right-wing religious crap that results in things like the war on drugs, legalized discrimination against gays, and a steady erosion in women's rights, but right-wing libertarian rhetoric about the supremacy of the market for solving all the world's ills and making businesses more powerful than democratically elected governments, and left-wing political correctness that had people fired for speaking controversially about certain topics).
Indeed, we wouldn't have this particular problem if people weren't propagating moronic notions of "property rights" trumping every other constitutional right, including that of free speech (and freedom of association). If freedom of speech applied, as it was intended, everywhere, for everyone, then you couldn't be fired for saying something stupid, be it to your colleagues, your flatmate, your co-workers (outside of business hours), or whoever, in whatever medium.
But we've lost track of that--now people, especially in the United States, promote the notion that "speech has consequences", which is true, but not the way they mean, and not like this. Getting fired for bad jokes is not a "natural consequence" of telling bad jokes any more than landing in prison for saying something the government (or a powerful business leader with friends in government) doesn't like. Both are an artifice to suppress speech and, in this particular case, an excuse to replace one person with seniority with someone else who is no doubt cheaper and more compliant. Scare people into compliance AND replace an experienced worker with a newbie who will work for peanuts: two birds, one stone.
Thanks to libertarian group-think, we are no longer citizens with constitutional freedoms and rights, we are merely peasants, living and eating at the sufferance of our corporate masters. And you know what? Most of us are too busy arguing vehemently for the rights of our masters to do whatever they want in the name of "it's their property, so no 'government' (read: constitutional) constraint should ever apply. Ridiculous, but the country is lousy with people who think exactly that, consequences be damned.
"Love is hate", "no is yes", "war is peace", and we live in a free society. Just so long as you don't actually try to exercize those freedoms against the wishes of your corporate master.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
People joke on the street about taking drugs all the time. I couldn't imagine batting an eye if I heard that walking by a group of strangers.
Some people see the internet as a big newspaper, with all of the authority, authenticity, and formality that entails. Something showing up on the internet is documented in a library permanently. Anyone looking up anything related to that person will inevitably come across that thing, tie that thing back to their employer. The West Allis police department would forever be associated with hiring a drug-using loony online.
Of course, that's not the case at all (at least, not until they made it newsworthy). The internet is dirtier, louder, and with a lot more noise. Nobody outside of that particular Emergency Dispatcher's family and friends were ever likely to see that post. The sheer volume of noise around the department, and even that particular dispatcher, made that possibility basically zero. And anyone digging that deeply would find far more controversial revelations about the city. This is, after all, the city that gave us both Liberace and Jeffery Dahmer.
It's like when photographs of schoolteachers drinking at weddings appear on the internet. Or when someone follows a twitter feed of a controversial gay rights advocate. People have to have lives outside of their jobs. They have to make controversial art, put up silly christmas displays, and protest government policies they disagree with. This all will get photographed or filmed by someone, and somehow it will go up on Flickr or YouTube. Some people in our society are still calibrated on the older scale, and can't deal with the idea that things which are OK to do in private frequently finds its way online.
This is especially significant when there are real problems out there. A one-sentence obvious joke about drug use is a major public relations nightmare? The high school students in my area sneak into bathrooms to shoot up, and one of their teachers was laid off for sleeping with them. We have a mugger prowling the area, along with a ton of dealers. And this is in a relatively safe city. Making a joke about doing drugs on Facebook isn't even a blip. Have they heard anything that is said in the fire department's locker rooms?
A simple "that's not cool, please take that down" would have resulted in the content being gone from the internet forever, and an employee a bit better educated about what the city is comfortable with. Also, it would have sidestepped this lawsuit. Destroying a career for it, though, is extreme. The only other alternative is to strive as hard as you can to keep any personally identifiable information or photographs off of the internet (how long before ip reverse lookup tables are trivial?), and down that road lies madness.
The ______ Agenda
I deleted my account over a year ago.
And it's been better ever since.
Seriously, if you don't know how to use facebook properly you're better off without it. It's a useful toy but it's not the answer to all the worlds problems - i'm tired of hearing from people who thought it was and then get all upset when they find it isn't.
I don't think so
"The arbitrator said she should be entitled to go back to work after a 30-day suspension, but the City of West Allis complained that was not appropriate."
So the city sets up a kangaroo court, is displeased with the results and declares it moot? Generally those contracts where you agree to settle things by arbitration are set up so the big can crush the little with a minimum of effort.
What was the purpose of arbitration if "the city" can simply say it is displeased with the result. I like how the TFA makes it sound like this is a talking city.
Is posting bad jokes on Facebook a justifiable reason to give someone the boot?"
All things being equal, the answer is no.
Once you consider the context, it depends. If my jokes involve insulting the company I work for, my managers or co-workers, then yes. Obviously, that was not the case with this person, but it's important to answer this question, given slashdotters' penchant for asking what-would-jeebuz-do open ended questions without context.
In this particular case, look at it like this: One has to be a real idiot to post jokes like that when on that of job... specially after having multiple warnings and write-offs at work. The dispatch department shouldn't have the power to fire her off like that, but it can,and this woman put herself in that situation... after multiple warnings and write-offs, unrelated nonetheless, but she should have known the department was looking for a way to get rid of her.
It's as if I were to work for the Secret Service or the NSA, with multiple warnings and write-offs all the while making jokes or half-assed statements about flying a plane on a building. We don't need to be computer/privacy-savy to exercise rudimentary common sense.
Companies and orgs should not have the power to fire people for stupid jokes plastered on their facebooks... but it happens. If you are that stupid to fall for that, shame on the company for abusing its power, and shame on you for being a moron without an ounce of common sense. I know, I know, freedom of speech and all that, but do you really want to exercise your right to be a clueless moron on a job like that, after multiple warnings and write-offs, without giving it any thought, just because?
Common sense and prudence. They can be useful.
I recall a recent story about a lab worker in California admitting to stealing and using drugs, and how all the cases that person worked on are now in danger of being brought up on appeal, and the probable criminals being released from jail because the lab technician could not be trusted. Isn't it possible that the dispatcher unit would need a zero-tolerance policy as well? If there is any hint of misconduct, a defendant will cling to that in court. It's the sort of liability a city can't afford to keep. That, and what would happen if this dispatcher unit had some unfortunate misses. Calls they thought were pranks or police units sent to the wrong place. The investigation the state performs after a complaint will likely find posts like this and wonder why the unit kept this woman on despite this.