Aftenposten Norway, Norwegian news in English — This is interesting news. Look at Porn at work — get Paid! Norway is indeed an advanced civilization.
Norway’s Supreme Court supported decisions refusing Conoco Phillips the right to fire two workers who surfed the Internet for pornographic images on company time.
The two workers on the Ekofisk field lost their jobs after being caught peeping at porn on the job in the summer of 2002. The pair took their case to court and won at both the municipal and appeals level, NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting) reports.
Conoco Phillips appealed the decisions to the Supreme Court in order to have a clarification of what employees can do on company time and what employers can do to enforce violations of company policy.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the firings were not justified and have awarded the two NOK 250,000 (USD 40,000) each in compensation.
tip: P. McEntee
Let’s not be hypocrites… Looking at porn sites is no worse than watching those joke movies or those cute powerpoints with cuddly bears and angels and babies saying you must love everyone…
The only difference is that porn is easy to attack – it immediately labels one as some sort of freak or pervert, which, of course, isn’t true most of the time, imvho.
Everyone is doing it at the office – get real, it is happening and there’s no way I know of stopping it. If only I found it I could stop my mail server being flooded with dozens of porn movies and powerpoints… Do you think HR would really fire a *director* for having hundreds of emails of porn on their hard drive? No way! They’d sooner fire ME for opening my mouth!
I don’t know anything about Norwegian law — except maybe about commercial fishing. But, this just might be an object lesson parallel to what already is required, Stateside, for privacy policies and internal management policies.
If you don’t put it in print and have folks sign off — then you’re stuck with precedent law. Most of which is still being invented as far as the Web is concerned.