Warning: Your clever little blog could get you or your wife fired :: Hey, fargo116, do you feel the pain yet?
Sleuthhound
on the Internet to chronicle his life, his friends and his job at a division
of Wells Fargo.
Then he began taking jabs at a few people he worked with.
His blog, gravityspike.blogspot.com, did find an audience: his bosses. In
August 2004, the 27-year-old was fired from his job handling mail and the
front desk, he says, after managers learned of his Web log, or blog.
His story is more than a cautionary tale. Delta Air Lines, Google and other
major companies are firing and disciplining employees for what they say
about work on their blogs, which are personal sites that often contain a mix
of frank commentary, freewheeling opinions and journaling.
And it's hardly just an issue for employees: Some major employers such as
IBM are now passing first-of-their-kind employee blogging guidelines
designed to prevent problems, such as the online publishing of trade
secrets, without stifling the kinds of blogs that can also create valuable
buzz about a company.
"Right now, it's too gray. There needs to be clearer guidelines," says
Whitney, who has found another job. "Some people go to a bar and complain
about workers, I decided to do it online. Some people say I deserve what
happened, but it was really harsh. It was unfair."
Wells Fargo declined to comment, but a spokeswoman said in an e-mail that
the company doesn't have a blogging policy.
Blogs are proliferating as fast as a computer virus. According to a report
this year by public relations firm Edelman and Intelliseek, a provider of
business-intelligence solutions, about 20,000 new blogs are created daily,
and an estimated 10 million U.S. blogs will exist by the end of 2005.
Together, these blogs link up to create what is known as a blogosphere, a
collective Internet conversation that is one of the fastest-growing areas of
new content on the Web.
More than 8 million adults in the USA have created blogs, according to two
surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a non-profit research
center studying the Internet's social effects. And 32 million Americans are
blog readers - a 58% jump in 2004.
Recognizing potential risks
Employers are just beginning to wake up to the potential risks that blogs
pose.
"The law is trying to catch up with the technology," says Allison Hift, a
telecommunications and technology lawyer in Miami. "This is like what we saw
a few years ago with employers passing polices about e-mail. Now we're
seeing it with Web logs."
The concerns are myriad. Employees who create blogs set up a direct way to
communicate about their company with the public, because customers and
clients can stumble across a blog. (Blogs often jump to the top of search
engines because they are updated often.) Bloggers may spill trademark or
copyright material on their sites, they may post pictures of
yet-to-be-released products, and they may libel or slander another employee
or a client.
A blogger can even get the ear of Congress. Douglas Roberts, a computer
scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M., started a
blog (lanl-the-real-story.blogspot.com), and anonymous posters blasted
management as incompetent. During a House subcommittee hearing in May, the
blog was mentioned in a discussion about the fate of the nuclear research
facility.
"I was quite surprised. I had no idea it would be this popular," Roberts
says, adding that lab management has been supportive of his blog and that he
believes blog policies in general are unnecessary.
Says lab spokesman Kevin Roark: "Open, honest, constructive discussion of
issues is a good thing ... (but) the personal attacks were unnecessary and
disappointing."
A number of employment lawyers, such as Hift, and bloggers, such as Whitney,
are urging companies to enact guidelines and communicate blogging rules to
employees. Some companies are doing just that: In May, IBM unveiled blogging
guidelines for its 329,000 employees. The guidelines state that employees
should identify themselves (and, when relevant, their roles at IBM) when
blogging about IBM.
"You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf
of IBM," the guidelines state. They also say bloggers should not use "ethnic
slurs, personal insults, obscenity, etc." and that they should "show proper
consideration" for "topics that may be considered objectionable or
inflammatory - such as politics and religion."
Others such as Microsoft have no formal guidelines specifically on blogging,
but do encourage blogging as a way for employees to reach out to customers
and clients. Says Jeff Sandquist, a group manager at Microsoft: "It's great.
It's instant feedback. ... We give a lot of support to blogging and on how
to be a good blogger."
Stifling free speech?
But it's tricky. Some civil libertarians fear blogophobic companies may
adopt policies that stifle the free exchange that has made blogs so popular.
"The concern is that it becomes a chilling effect," says Annalee Newitz, a
policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based
civil liberties organization dealing with high-tech issues. "We don't want
people to feel like ... they can't express their feelings."
Others argue that more explicit guidelines are needed.
"Companies probably need separate policies," says Robert Cox, president of
the Media Bloggers Association.
Guidelines, some bloggers say, could even help save jobs. When Ellen
Simonetti started her blog chronicling her life and work as a Delta Air
Lines flight attendant, she posted some pictures of herself on her site,
queenofsky.journalspace.com. There's a shot of her in her blue uniform,
bending over an airline seat as her white bra peeks out. A shot of her
backside. Another of her in her uniform, sprawled across the tops of the
seats of an empty plane. Another shows her eating in a seat.
In October 2004, Simonetti, 30, of Austin was fired, she says, for the
pictures on her blog. She has filed a complaint with the federal Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission, saying the suspension amounted to
discrimination, because male employees with similar online photos were not
disciplined. The EEOC case is pending.
"Companies should have policies so that we know if we're breaking the
rules," says Simonetti, who is unemployed. "I feel I was mistreated and
treated unfairly. I'm fighting for bloggers' rights and free speech."
A Delta spokeswoman declined to comment.
Some bloggers are adding disclaimers saying they don't represent the
company, or they are taking precautions not to blog from work. That may be
wise: A Society for Human Resource Management survey found that some
employers also are looking at job candidates' personal blogs before hiring
them.
Legal status unclear
Blogging is so new, lawyers say it's unknown how courts will rule as cases
come forward. Bob Blackstone, a Seattle-based employment lawyer, says
employees may argue that blogs fall under federal laws that protect
labor-organizing activity. They may also argue that their blog content is
allowed under certain state laws that bar employers from discriminating
against workers for off-duty actions.
Cases continue to climb. Heather Armstrong was fired in February 2002 by the
Los Angeles-based software firm where she worked after venting online about
the company on her blog, dooce.com. Some excerpts from her blog: Take a
two-hour lunch: one hour for the bean burrito, one hour for the nap in the
front seat of your car.
Reasons I should not be allowed to work from home:Too many cushiony
horizontal surfaces prime for nappage. ... I can lie down underneath my
desk, and no one is going to know. No one.
Her case garnered attention and put the blogging world on notice.
UrbanDictionary.com now defines "dooced" as losing your job for something
you wrote on your online blog.
Both sides now
And Mark Jen, 22, of San Francisco started his blog in January to chronicle
his life and new job as an associate product manager at Google. He wrote
comments about future potential products and lost his job two weeks later,
he says, because of his blog, 99zeros.blogspot.com.
"I figured it would be an easy way to keep in touch with friends and
family," Jen says. "I was surprised at the reaction of the company. It was
shocking to me."
At his new job at Mountain View, Calif.-based Plaxo, a consumer Internet
service for updating and accessing contact information, Jen recently helped
draft the company's first-ever blog policy. The policy says, in part, that
employees can't violate the privacy or publicity rights of another, can't
personally attack employees, authors, customers, vendors or shareholders and
can't post material that is "hateful or embarrassing to another person."
Employees who don't follow the guidelines can be fired.
from:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/workplace/2005-06-14-worker-blogs-usat_x.htm
Lamont Cranston
Queefer, Fargo works for himself and doesn't have a wife. You lose
again.