How To Lose Your Job, Thanks To The Internet 654
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?
Not much is new here. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
More like how to lose your job cause you're stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if employers terminate people unreasonably for being part of a political organization, due to their ethnicity or religion or for some other discriminatory reason the existing legal protection needs to come into play (as is the case of Stacy Snyder mentioned in TFA - terminating someone for being seen with a large glass of alcohol is moronic - that said she's better off with a different employer if that's how her current one acts). We don't need new special laws for the Internet. We may need minor adjustments to existing laws to take the Internet into account. We certainly don't need special protection for morons be they employer or employee.
Are we really suppose to have sympathy for morons who don't know what they put on the net is public?
Re:More like how to lose your job cause you're stu (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, no kidding! (Score:4, Insightful)
My father taught me this when I was six, and it rings true here. At a baseball game, some reporter was going around asking for public opinion regarding some baseball issue. My father denied the interview saying that he was the officer of a public communications company, and should not be presented publicly by this reporter; even on a matter as unrelated as his opinions on baseball.
Now, I own and operate my own company. And yes, I look for good people to work with me. You'd beter believe I want them to be good people all-around. Their welcome to vent to me, and they can insult me to my face all they like. They can insult my clients to my face as well. But when they do anything that my clients can see, or to which my clients have access, they had better conduct themselves in a manner that I deem suitable.
Right or wrong, if my client says that they don't like my employee, I take that very seriously. Accidents and general human error are acceptable in moderation. Disregard for my business -- even during off-hours -- is completely unacceptable.
In my perspective, many employees (I don't mean only mine, I do in fact include many of my friends that work for others) consider their employment to be a right. No matter how good you are at your job, your employor has invested way more time and way more effort, and way more RISK into the business than you'll ever even consider for as long as you're an employee.
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.
My father would come home, after long days of negotiating some government contract for the communication company for which he worked. After a successful victory, he'd boast to his wife how he'd saved the company millions of dollars. She'd turn to him and say: "so, how much of it is ours?". Of course the answer is zero. That was his job, he did it well, he got paid as expected, plus or minus an annual bonus. The given victory meant nothing financially.
Know that when you work for someone else, you get to avoid the many headaches that go into running a business and being accountable to an entity that you've created. Also know that when you go out on your own, you deserve all of the glory, credit, blame, and defeat.
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying that the companies are justified in disciplining workers for off-job activities, but that it's a much stickier situation than just "corporate fascist bastards bringin' me down".
Re:Whoa (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, no kidding! (Score:4, Insightful)
You treat them like shit they'll do shit work. It'll be nice looking shit because you've told them that appearance is all that matters. But it'll still be shit.
A company is a collaboration of everyone working together as a team. *everyone* takes risks and *everyone* shares in the rewards. The boss has the highest potential reward (and the highest potential loss) but it's not *their* company exclusively because they couldn't possibly do everything on their own. They needed the employees. Not slaves, as you seem to believe.
Re:Well, no kidding! (Score:5, Insightful)
And we wonder where loyalty went? With this attitude you'll get the employees you deserve.
Where to draw the line, though? (Score:5, Insightful)
I want to quote this first:
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.
This is wrong.. (Score:1, Insightful)
On the other hand employers really don't have business firing people over online activities. In the example given, firing someone for drinking a single cup of
Luckily I work somewhere where this is no problem. People behave on the job, and can do anything they want on their own time. I know for a fact that people that have worked at my current place of employment have drank, gotten into barfights, smoked pot, done the occasional 8-ball, and some were into guns and knives. Well, they don't drink, do drugs, fight, or play with knives and guns at work, so it's simply irrelevant to work. This is the American way -- off-work time is off-work time and people can do whatever they want in that time.
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, no kidding! (Score:2, Insightful)
You want to be a part of my business and be treated as an equal, you get to put in an equal or equivalent amount. Most employees have absolutely no idea what goes on outside of their desk and their hours.
When your mother told you to clean your room, and you thought that was annoying, wait until you get to fix the roof, pay the mortage, calculate the taxes that someone else charges but won't calculate for you, and then clean the rest of the house. You don't get to be a part of household decisions because you have no idea what they are.
Contradicton (Score:5, Insightful)
I find that their sense of ethics is usually quite impaired.
Re:More like how to lose your job cause you're stu (Score:4, Insightful)
Two of the three examples you cite are about people who have been convicted of a crime. Convict status is something you don't need the Internet to find out and is something where there is a legal reduction in rights. The third example of a teacher moonlighting as an actor or model for pornography is rather an extreme and (I believe intentionally) inflammatory example. It is by necessity a public profession and one in which participation could be revealed even if no Internet existed.
Where I live, the state of Georgia here in the USA, your employer has the right to terminate you for any reason whatsoever (excepting of course discriminatory reasons based on minority, religious, veteran or disabled status) or without cause. So its not about the right of your employer to terminate. Its about the wisdom of terminating someone based on something you found out about them online. Any competent manager should be able to tell whether you are doing your job well or not, without the aid of facebook photos showing your drinking, getting high, or snorting coke off a strippers tits. If you can do your job, why should it matter what you put on the net?
You seem really fond of the word moron and its variants which you use thrice in your post. It of course refers to someone with diminished intelligence. So in response to your question, should I have sympathy for someone who has limited intellectual faculties, my response is yes. Of course, I do. What kind of monster are you that you don't?! But perhaps your repeated use of moron and variants is an indication of your own limitations, in this case of vocabulary. Maybe you meant to describe the individuals as foolhardy, naive, ignorant... In all of these cases, I still have sympathy for them. Everyone makes mistakes, but the Internet can trap those mistakes indefinitely like a fly in amber. Preserved for who knows how long... It is a major shift from a time when even the most celebrated of mistakes a person might make would fade in the collective memory and only diligent searching of newspaper archives, public records, and other references would uncover it.
I think your callous dismissal of the serious issue raised here is unwarranted. If anything it contributes to the ignorance that your deride (inaccurately with the word 'moron'). You suggest that people should already be aware of an issue at the same time you mock the fact that the issue is even being discussed. Obviously, given that people are ignorant of it, it needs to be discussed more, not less!
Re:Well, no kidding! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well, no kidding! (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you ever wonder why you're resented and hated by your employees, this is why. When you wonder why the employee loyalty your business needs (or you even crave) isn't there, this is the reason. You look at people as cogs in your machine and not fellows. They're there to be exploited and not to be part of the company.
A business isn't one man or one man's risk no matter how much you'd like to put it in those terms. Your business belongs not only to you, but to everyone who works for you.
Let's put it in realistic terms. Your client has a relationship with your company, and not just with you. He has a relationship with the salesmen who talk to him, the support people he calls when he's got a problem, and the people who manufactures the product he's buying.
When you eliminate any one of those people for anything but the most important of reasons (no, not profit. The long-term survival of your company is what your eyes SHOULD be focused on) you are diminishing your company's relationship with that client.
When your client says he has a problem with a single member of that team, you need to think long and hard about why. Is your client prejudiced? Is your client sane? More importantly, is your client looking out for your company's best interests? Almost certainly not.
Don't agree? Fire your important employees and replace their jobs with cheaper, less-experienced people. 'Outsource' if you dare. Watch your clients start to complain. Their money is about to go elsewhere.
Instead, why don't you learn to treat your employees as not only cogs in a machine, but individual people with cares and concerns of their own who are also important parts of your company? Your company's long-term health will show you the value of that. Profit will follow.
Re:Well, no kidding! (Score:5, Insightful)
salaried == always on the clock (Score:4, Insightful)
People know who works for who, and so my employees' actions reflect on the company. I have to protect the image of my company. Firing someone for having a drunken binge and then gloating about it online reflects poorly on the professionalism of my company, and therefore could result in a loss of revenue, and that could result in a stock holder lawsuit. So you see, even if I didn't want to, I have no choice other than to constantly monitor the actions of my employees and reprimand them when they're actions run counter to the company's interest.
If potential employees didn't like this behavior, then they wouldn't interview or accept offers from my company. That's just how the free market works, and since people do work for me, that shows they don't have any problems with this arrangement. The free market works again! And anyway, they posted the things online, so they gave up any privacy, so they should just accept the consequences.
And finally, this is all private surveillance instead of government so there's nothing wrong with it.
* * *
Of course, I was being sarcastic, but I fully expect there to be multiple posts that reiterate these ideas, only for real. There are plenty of people in today's America that want to essentially repeal the 20th century. I strongly suspect because there are people that for whatever reason, never saw power they didn't like, because they have the delusional belief that someday they will have that power. [salon.com]
Employers can read your email because they own the network. However they can't listen into your phone calls, even though they own the phones. The difference? One law was passed in the 30s or 40s. The other in the 90s.
The lassie faire free market capitalism is model. Nothing more. It's an ideal model, not unlike ideal wires in electrical engineering. They don't exist. The perfect market doesn't exist, because it hinges on perfect information, which doesn't exist. The market doesn't capture lots of things, namely pretty much everything that doesn't have a directly quantifiable cost. Even if you could assign a cost to these things, which you can't, the market doesn't necessarily work fast enough.
Re:Well, no kidding! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you give your employees a vested interest in the success of your business then employee productivity will be much greater than if you treat them like "cogs."
Re:You can still make an effort (Score:4, Insightful)
Fortunately, you are not limited to two online identities (the real and the pen name.) You can have as many as you want, and use them in proper spheres. You can be one on /., another on music forums, yet another on car enthusiasts' forums, and yet another, the real one, for official use. This will allow you to separate your technical opinions from your political or musical interests, and to prevent cross-contamination of your opinion on Urusei Yatsura [wikipedia.org] with your comments about Ron Paul [ronpaul2008.com], for example.
The great thing about the internet is that people *can* find you
Sure, they can find someone known as foobar123 on Ford forums just as easy as otaku456 on manga forums. Nobody needs to know more, unless you choose to tell someone.
"job security" has always been an illusion
Still there is no good reason to be a witness against yourself. In many cases if the real name of the poster is not known, it will remain not known (unless there is a really serious, legal or security-related need to find that out.) Besides, how does it matter to me what your real name is? Your name is whatever you tell me, and that's all I want to know. It's not like I'm planning to send you snail mail, for example. Your real name is of no use to me.
An ass is an ass, and no company wants to employ somebody like that.
In 99.999% of cases that person is bad at home and just as bad at work. If you can find someone who is Dr. Jekyll at work and Mr. Hyde at home, he is an exceptional actor. There are people like that, especially among criminals, but that's not what we are talking about here. If such a criminal is working as your cashier you won't hear a single bad word about him until he steals everything you have; he'd be excellent at work and at home until that last moment.
Of course, you can argue about moral standards, but if your company doesn't share your own moral standards, then maybe you shouldn't be working there to begin with.
Of course, it implies that you have to sacrifice your job just so you can openly display something that the company - an amorphous, amoral, collective entity - has no need to know to begin with. Sounds like a bad deal to me, in terms of gain vs. reward. When I work for someone I sell my labor, not my soul.
Re:Well, no kidding! (Score:5, Insightful)
The market value of my stock and options currently equals two years of my salary, and that is with the price being hammered by distressed institutional investors. If I help deliver new products that impress investors, it goes straight to my personal bottom line.
Not with a bad reference, or termination-for-mistake on the resume.
Somebody should tell that to the scientists and engineers I work with, who have been known to invent new lines of business and start spin-off companies.
Re:Well, no kidding! (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, just wow. That's simply retarded. How the flying FUCK can you justify that? Maybe she has a neighbor who works for your client's competition, or a former teacher or professor or classmate or babysitter who now does, let alone USED TO.
My employer is my boss not my clients, our company has clients that are in direct and indirect competition with each other, and if any client want's one of our employees fired it'd better be for a better fucking reason than the past work history of a relative. WE've fired clients for much much less.
Re:Well, no kidding! (Score:3, Insightful)
You might as well really take that final step and be willing to fire people for being the "wrong" race too, you get a client that doesn't like asians and won't work with asians and think that they'll do a poor job, why not just fire the asian? Why not? Your business is more important than someone's job.
In my view, both situations are equally devolved.
Fire at WILL (Score:3, Insightful)
It is probably better this way because if you "protect" the employment relationship (like Europe), you basically make employers very fearful of hiring anyone. That also produces a very immobile, unflexible and fearful workforce.
The real reason employers don't act arbitrarily in most cases is pure self-interest: it is risky and hard to train and integrate new employees. A dismissal that others think is wrong is likely to very negatively affect morale in the remaining employees and is very ill-advised unless you believe they are all slackers and you want to axe the whole dept.
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:5, Insightful)
Things are different if you have actual company secrets, or if you're a corporate official. But in that case, you're hired EXACTLY to tell the company what you think.
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:5, Insightful)
Commerce is partially a social interaction, and economic prosperity is largely dependent upon successful commerce. If you repulse your potential customers (or other such profitable interactors) by way of your public speech or stances, you will be less able or likely to commit successful commercial transactions, and will find yourself economically disadvantaged. That's just the fact of a free market.
If you are an employee, depending on your role and its visibility, your advancement may be based on how well you sympathize with and reflect the important values of your employer. After all, a group of people who are all ideologically opposed but supposedly working together is a recipe for failure. Luckily, since free enterprise is legal, and you cannot be outrightly prohibited from changing your job, field, or marketing strategy (depending on who or what you are), you can take your free-speakin' self into the free market and see how well your ideologically-charged business flies among more sympathetic souls. (Granted, this is a less-than-perfect rendition in real life, given that there are monopolies and barriers-to-entry to some fields... call it "implementation hurdles")
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:2, Insightful)
Imagine you hired a babysitter to watch your kids and she's great with the kids and everything, but one day you find their myspace and there's blogs about doing drugs and all kinds of stuff you just wouldn't want your kids around, what would you do? Think you'd trust her anymore? Think you might keep an eye out for a new babysitter? Why should a company do something different?
if you think what you do in your free time has absolutely no impact on your work performance you're wrong.
The solution is simple: stop puttin' frinkin' pictures, videos and blogs on the net! I'm tired of people thinking they should publicize videos of every druggie drunkin rave they're involved with, then crying when their boss finds it!
Re:Always use an alias. (Score:3, Insightful)
He was great except for no recent Solaris experience? And that was enough to decide against him?? That you can afford that luxury shows the IT job market is too much in favor of employers. Same as this article about some poor employee losing a job over something posted online, outside of work. You've got it just too fat and easy that you can sit there with 100s of candidates, 80% of whom could do the job and you know it, and you moan that not one has all of HP-UX 11.11 and Solaris 9 and RHEL 5 and AIX 5L 5.3 on a 64 bit platform, and experience with even narrower specialties such as Veritas Cluster and Reiser4 and ZFS, and scripting languages, and nothing "irresponsible" posted on the Internet. Hope you're not wondering why college freshmen aren't choosing IT related degrees. Training him would not have cost much, I think you overestimate that expense and time. He'd learn most of it on the job anyway, but your manager is just too cheap to allow a measly 2 weeks to get up to speed, while spending, what, 3 weeks waiting for a "better" person to show up. And you know what? It's quite possible that "better" person might have read the job description, downloaded Solaris (since it's open source now) and given himself a crash course on it with the version he downloaded and whatever info he can find on the web about the actual version required, so he can say he has experience and demonstrate just enough to wing the interview successfully.
Then please don't be so picky over skills. You throw a lot of babies out with the bathwater when you do that. Ability is what counts. Skills are trivial, they really are. You're zeroing in on a particular version of a particular OS, and overlooking that the important thing is that a candidate know a few OSes, and that it doesn't much matter which ones. If he knows HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Windows Server 2003, he's not going to have any problem figuring out Solaris. I have seen a lot of jobs I can do and do well and efficiently after a very short time to learn the ropes, but not get hired to do thanks to attitudes like your manager's. It sounds like you'd rather hire a high school dropout so long as he's got the exact right skills, than hire a person with an engineering degree and closely related but not exactly matching skills. And of course you have never ever listed a "required" skill that wasn't really required? Never thrown together a long list of requirements that no one can meet so you can hire whomever you really want for whatever actual reasons, and have an ironclad pretext to tell everyone else? Most employers play those games, so why shouldn't job seekers play too?
Let's make this simple. (Score:4, Insightful)
The shit people do and then link to their name is ridiculous. If I post something under my given name that can reflect badly onto me and the company I work for. Now at the same time if I post something under a pseudonym (kinglink is one) then that at least should not be considered the same thing. However at the same time if I link my account to my last name in any way (signing a post with my real name?) then again that becomes public knowledge. My company likely knows kinglink is me, that's fine I'm not betraying my company I'm not being stupid, I'm not trying to hide who I am, but the minute I would need to believe me, Kinglink will not be the name I try that with.
At the very least let's all realize that the internet is here to stay. So it's fine to post a picture of you as a fairy in a pride parade. But at the same time also realize someone searching for your information is likely to find and can and will make opinions on you or your background based on it.
Oh and a little hint, if you're playing hooky, and you take pictures DONT POST THEM ON FACEBOOK OR ANYTHING LINKED TO YOU! There's too many stories about this with people getting busted. Or again at the very least tamper with the date and time on your camera before you take your pictures.
Laws have consequences, which may or may not suck (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd agree that requiring employers to make allowances that mean they need to consider a single man and mother equally means there may be calculable drag on employers. That by itself doesn't mean it's not a good idea, it simply means there's no such thing as a free lunch. The question is if that's the best place to pay/way for the problem of mothers who don't have sufficient incomes in their households, and if it's by and large an acceptable tradeoff.
In my case, our development schedules often include days that are religious holidays. I can't lose my employees to "a higher power"
I'd argue that it's also better to have a society that doesn't discriminate based on religion than it is to have businesses at peak efficiency, too, but that's not really relevant to your statement. Because you're not talking about operating a peak efficiency -- any development schedule that can't accommodate up to a dozen holidays a year and a weekly sabbath of some kind (whether spent in piety or revelry or somewhere in between) is already screwed up, likely negatively influenced by fatigue and diminishing returns, and it ought to scare off any developer with good sense, who ought to run hard and fast unless you're offering some unusually good compensation.
Even if, however, the documentation fell the other way, it's possible that the good done by encouraging a society that doesn't discriminate based on religious belief might outweigh the business economic case.
now hold on just one minute.. who says it was me? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here I am, enjoying my drunken rave - having a great time, I even leave my phone at home.. no disturbances for me this new years' eve.. just me, my friends, that cute girl I met and jello shots.
A week later, I get fired, because my boss saw a video of it.. turns out the girl was his niece; go fig. Now what video? I don't know - I certainly didn't take any, let alone give it to him. Turns out that somebody else was shooting some video of their friends.. I don't know them, they don't know me, but I sure was in the background of their video.
Not everything is a "babysitter caught doing drugs", but may still be something you don't really want to share with the world for whatever reason; but you don't always have a say in this yourself.
So the solution is not so simple; unless you're saying that the real simple solution is to live puritan life 24/7 so that there is never a chance of anybody, anywhere, catching you doing things that might be perfectly acceptable in the situation you were in, but perhaps not so acceptable to your employer.. parents.. whoever/whatever.
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:3, Insightful)
Between trusting my own eyes or some webpage which may or may not be made by the person in question, and may or may not contain any grain of truth, I'll choose my own eyes, thank you very much. It's not like someone who's high on drugs can hide that fact, unless they're really wimpy drugs ;).
Besides, alcohol is a drug; are you going to disqualify a babysitter because you've seen a picture of her drinking beer, despite her never being drunk while on the job ?
Re:More like how to lose your job cause you're stu (Score:3, Insightful)
A few weeks later your boss calls you in her office and wants to know why there are photos of you posted on the internet in which you are obviously drunk, with beer in one hand and a drunken floosy in the other. You and her are clearly making sexual gestures, a joke at the time, but unfortunately the punchline is lost in the photo. Worse yet, you're doing it while wearing a baseball cap bearing the corporate logo. You say "but, I don't know those got on the net".
Later, you find out your friend (or co-worker) Y was snapping photos with his cell phone and posted them to his myspace account. You curse him as you pack your cardboard box and promptly escorted from the building.
Morale of the story. Not everyone has the power to prevent others publishing information about you, be it text, photos or videos. It can happen, has happened, and will continue to happen. Your post was far from "insightful"; it was merely ignorant and unsympathetic.
Oh yes, ever heard of dontdatehimgirl.com? I'm sure your future boss will appreciate reading all about you upon googling your name and finding all the dirt your ex-girlfriend spilled on you. Have fun with the job search.
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's face facts: We get a lot of our stuff from China. China makes little kids work in sweatshops so they can make this stuff cheap. The average American doesn't give a rat's ass about what employees do on or off the clock as long as they can get what they want for cheap.
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:3, Insightful)
Almost all of them. People might not like the idea of their accountant dropping acid, whether or not it has any impact on the job he performs for them. A biker might not like finding out that his tattoo artist just got back from a gay wedding. An ad agency in San Francisco might have trouble if their VP is hosting Republican fundraisers.
Any time someone departs from their expected role in life, some customer is probably going to be offended. That's not right, but you can't dictate the terms in which your customers come to you. Employers can take the moral high ground and say "it doesn't matter and if you don't like it, go somewhere else". This is admirable and the right thing to do. It will also cost them money.
Things get really complicated when you factor in public investment and responsibilities to shareholders. Do you take a hit because you're standing behind Bob from Accounting and possibly risk an investor lawsuit (potentially making things very difficult for other employees), or do you tell Bob to look elsewhere?
Again, I'm not saying that it's right, but I can certainly understand the logic behind companies making the latter decision. They're not saying "act the way we want you to". They're saying "don't act in a way that will make our customers leave us".
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not an anti-corporate wacko. I like what big business can do for economies. Unfortunately, I'm also a humanist. Any organization that reduces individual rights purely on the idea that it might impact profit -- not government security, not the welfare of others, but profit -- skates right over some basic human rights and thus loses my respect.
What's most disturbing about the original article is its implications. You can lose your job for your online presence? Really? Well how much longer before you get asked why you're a part of this club or that? In Dubya's -- and, god forbid, Huckabee's -- America, how much longer before we're asked why we didn't go to Church that weekend?
Most people put up with the ridiculous clauses in employment contracts for exactly the reason one responder offered: They need a job. The solution, therefore, seems to be this: Don't want the restrictions? Don't take the job. But people need jobs for things like paying off student loans, medical bills, and, oh yeah, shoes and food, so that's not necessarily an option. As a result, people give up freedom for security...and we all know where that leads.
The problem, simply put, is that we as a people need to collectively say "No!" to such nonsense. Not in some Marxist, communist nonsense way, but in a way that asserts our rights as a people once again. Unless we do, I suggest we all get used to the idea freedoms that we once took for granted will vanish, one by one.
There is hope, though. A few years back, I worked with two guys in the IT field who had left the legal profession to work with systems. (Something about it being more honest, for what it's worth.) The subject of employment contracts came up, and they pulled a copy of theirs out of their files. It looked like mine, except it had many, many, many clauses marked off and initialed. They explained to me that these were clauses that they would not agree to, and as such would not sign off on. Much to my shock, the company -- after making some groans, of course -- agreed to their terms and hired them.
The moral of this story? Read your employment contracts, and don't agree to anything you don't feel comfortable about. The company isn't buying you, remember. They are buying your time and skill in order to provide a service. It's a simple business arrangement, nothing more. Don't let them convince you otherwise.
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:2, Insightful)
You're not talking about honor. You're talking about honesty. Expecting that from a worker comes with the territory. But a "bond of honor"? No freaking way.
Speaking as one who has managed personnel in corporate America, I'm here to remind you that most business organizations see people as replaceable resources, nothing more. They'll gladly dump personnel who have given them fifteen years loyal service for someone younger and cheaper, all with absolutely no notice. (Saw that with my own two eyes.) They'll replace skilled workers who have done outstanding technical work with a family relative who thinks the work "sounds neat", once again with no notice and with no care as to the negative impact that such actions would have on productivity and worker morale. (Once again, I've seen this myself.) When business show loyalty nor honor to the individuals that actually produce their product, they deserve no honor nor loyalty in return, short of the most basic fulfillment of their business arrangement agreed upon between parties.
That all being said, I do agree that workers should be honest, and do the work that they have agreed to perform in their business contracts. But beyond that, the business has no business poking their heads into the personal life of their workers. We are a free people, no indentured servants. The sooner we act like it, the sooner business will be forced to remember that.
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:3, Insightful)
The solution to this is quite simple, really, really simple, just don't do anything online with your real name.
Works for me, the last time I self googled, I found only 1 reference which could reasonably be traced back to me, and not a single other reference in the first 5 or 6 pages of any combination of my real name and initials.
The other thing is that the internet isn't private, unless you communicate via encrypted emails or on SSL protected private fora, the information is there for anybody that cares to look for it. Assuming that it isn't is really a mistake. Even with protection laws it isn't exactly easy in all cases to know if the online postings were the real reason for a disciplinary action.
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:3, Insightful)
You missed the point entirely... Let me rephrase it in your own terms:
You forgot examples...
It is not just "my" corporations, darn it... The law applies/would apply to everyone, who has ever paid anybody. Get this through your thick bones — we are all employers to some degree. If you want to be able to legally hesitate in hiring a NAMBLA-activist (and I am not particularly against the organization, but most people are) as your babysitter, you must also allow those evil "corporations" to avoid people with opinions, they find disagreeable.
Those corporations may be sitting in their corporate buildings, they may be acting corporationy [wikiquote.org], and — heavens — they may even be making money. But they are still owned by real people, whose right to not associate with someone, they dislike, is no less sacred than your own.
To quote Lionel Jefferson... (Score:3, Insightful)