Employers slow to develop rules on blogging about jobs
The number of bloggers continues to grow, but the number of workplace policies explaining companies’ rules on blogging remains anemic. And that can cause a lot of workplace angst for management and workers.
Although there are no real statistics on how many people have been fired for something they wrote on their personal blogs, the stories keep coming:
A reporter in Dover, Del., was fired for offensive postings on his personal blog. He was just added to the list. Remember “Washingtonienne,” the intern who embarrassed her bosses on Capitol Hill when she described sexcapades with unnamed staffers? A Microsoft employee was canned after he posted a picture that included Macs the company had purchased.
According to a survey done by the Society for Human Resource Management in July, 85 percent of companies do not have a written policy that provides employees with guidelines on what is acceptable to write about in a personal blog, while 8 percent do.
Nice thing about being retired. No one records my online activity other than the FBI, NSA, Army Intelligence [sic], CIA.
Of course, spending a half-century at political activism — and living downhill from Los Alamos National Labs — probably doesn’t help.
This could be a tricky one.
If your employer is not identified, then what is the problem?
Unless…
If you mention someone at work and the people at work can identify who it is, you better be careful.
The problem arises because most states are “at will” in employment. That means they do not need an excuse to fire you, or for you to quit. So if you piss of the boss for what ever reason, you could be fired with the snap of his fingers. The only protection American workers have is if they can definitively show the employer discriminated. Otherwise, you are S.O.L.
Am I being monitored at work? I neither know nor care. I keep my work separate from my leisure. I don’t work on personal stuff at work and I will not work on work stuff at home.