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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. -
So I assume she was getting paid for those 16 hours of every weekday (and 48 hours of weekends every week) where she was required to abide by some company "behaviour code"?
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Businesses should fire people who are too stupid to understand the impact of their actions on their company.
Ah yes, the good, old "you're just a slave after all" argument.
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.
Basically, yes.
My company pays me from 9 to 5 and that does NOT give them the right to invade my live the rest of the time. In return, I will not meddle with their buissness outside office times. What happens at the office, stays at the office, and what happens outside, happens outside. Thats a matter of basic decency.
Of course there is a good measure of flexibility to this rule, but that works both ways. If my boss doesn't mind leaving me an hour early from time to time, the less I mind the occasional overtime.
bickerdyke
In this case, the City of West Allis is a "government", not a "business", and its emergency dispatchers are government employees, not private employees in some sort of dispatching industry. The First Amendment has been held to apply to state and local governments since 1925, and applies to some extent even when the government is acting as employer.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
she had already been taken through 4 of the mandatory 5 steps to dismissal
"Kuchler was already on thin ice with the city, having gone through four of the five disciplinary steps required by the collective bargaining agreement with the local clerical union: a verbal warning, written warning, one-day-suspension, and three-day-suspension."
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/05/police_dispatcher_fired_for_st.php
so it seems that for whatever reason, her bosses didn't think much of her...
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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!
Which makes this whole story sensationalist. It's not like "make a drug joke, get fired", it's "be on the verge of being fired and pile on the straw that broke the camel's back". Nobody really wants to have people in that position for long, either you want the employee to really straighten themselves out or you want them out, no in betweens. There's no goodwill at that point.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Wait, do you mean *on the job* freedom of speech, or only when you go home?
If the former, that would certainly change the nature of *my* job in fundamental ways.
I work at a public library. At work (and in the presence of the public), I'm not supposed to express an opinion on basically *anything* (well, anything of substance; I can talk about the weather). Religion, politics, history, education, science, you name it. This goes to extremes in my line of work. When a patron asks me for books on how the fall of Rome resulted in the creation of angels (yes, this is a real example), I'm supposed to try to help them find books on that, without comment. In practice this means books on angels and books on the history of Rome. I know very well that the books on the history of Rome won't say anything about the creation of angels and the books on angels won't say anything about the fall of Rome, but I cannot *tell* the patron this. I have to keep a straight face while I help them find the books.
So my job would be pretty radically different if on-the-job free speech were legally mandatory.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I don't think so