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New Zealand Court Orders Facebook Disclosure To Employer
An anonymous reader writes with a story out of New Zealand: "Gina Kensington was sacked by Air New Zealand earlier this year following a dispute over sick leave she took to care for her sister. She said she did not misuse sick leave, and went to the Employment Relations Authority (ERA) seeking reinstatement. Air New Zealand responded by demanding to see her Facebook and bank details. Kensington refused, saying it did not have that information when it dismissed her and that 'it is well accepted in New Zealand there are general and legal privacy expectations about people's personal and financial information.'"
At least in the U.S., Facebook isn't keen on employers getting access to employees' Facebook account details.
This is why I think the work sick needs to be taken out of the equation, because everybody is different. For example when I am having one of my migraines as long as I wear REALLY dark glasses i can do basic tasks like follow a list to get groceries, but can I work on PCs like I normally do? Nope because those backlit screens are like jabbing needles in my eyes, even the one on my cell hurts. But if you saw me at the store you'd think "hey there is nothing wrong with him!" because while i couldn't do my job basic tasks that don't involve screens is doable, again as long as I wear really dark shades to block out most of the light.
So we really need to just call it paid time off and be done with it, because sick days leave too many loopholes on both sides.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Someone tipped them off that she wasn't caring for her sister and was using it like a vacation. To what extent we don't know.
An argument of 'I was smart and there's no way you could have known what I was up to, so you can't have fired me for that' is exceptionally child like.idea.
Funny thing about it, If someone posts about the great vacation they had while "sick", they get fired but I'll bet if they post about how they worked 120 hours/week last month saving the company from their incompetent boss who may actually be working for the competition on the side, they don't seem to get a new boss or a performance bonus. How odd!
Oh, there's plenty of details of my personal life online. My charity work. My breakthroughs in security research. The various projects of my spare time.
Huh? No, they have very little to do with reality. And should a recruiter ever ask whether they are, I will answer truthfully. But to ask that, they'd first of all have to admit that they were trying to snoop on me with online means, which they never will.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Slightly off-topic but I wonder how realistic reinstatement is as a remedy in cases like this. Presumably by now the company has hired someone else to do her job, given them her desk and all her files/work. Do they get fired if she comes back? Do they just have to make more work for her?
Of course it's the company's fault, so she should not lose out, I'm just interested in how it works in practice.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'd prefer to live in a society where no-one is a beggar and employment law means that you never end up in a really shitty position where your boss abuses you just because you have no other choice.
That is the mainstream view in Europe, but I realize some parts of the world consider it extremely left-wing.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
We hear this all the time. "You don't want to work for this company!" An entire judgement against a massive company as the result of one news article. Often these one news articles are the result of one stupid HR person in one small part of a small office and in an attempt to save face they took their actions to the extreme.
Funny how we pass judgement based on the experience of 0.01% of the employees of the company.
Funny how we pass judgement when we've heard only an article which covers one side of the story (I'm sure a company doesn't routinely fire all employees who take leave without some thought that it was improper).
Funny how a post like yours always somehow is deemed insightful.
The only thing really certain here is that this IS a company that this person wants to work for, or she wouldn't have taken them to the tribunal to get re-instated.