How to Lose Your Job on Your Own Time

By RANDALL STROSS
Published: December 30, 2007

WERE Henry Ford brought back to life today, he would most likely be delighted by the Internet: the uninhibited way many people express themselves on the Web makes it easy to supervise the private lives of employees.

In his day, the Ford Motor Company maintained a “Sociological Department” staffed with investigators who visited the homes of all but the highest-level managers. Their job was to dig for information about the employee’s religion, spending and savings patterns, drinking habits and how the worker “amused himself.”

Home inspections are no longer needed; many companies are using the Internet to snoop on their employees. If you fail to maintain amorphous “professional” standards of conduct in your free time, you could lose your job.

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. (contd)

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/business/30digi.html?ref=technology

:kick:
Stand with the workers or with the corporations.

We have a PGP 5th Am 'right'?



What do you think? PGP 5th Am. is a protection?

...egh.

... they were unseemly, anyway.