Blogged Out of a Job: Should Employers Have A Say Over Blogging On Your Own Time?

Blogged Out of a Job

This story is about fascism that is invading our lives.

"The number of bloggers continues to grow, but the number of workplace policies explaining the company's rules on blogging remains anemic. And that can cause a lot of workplace angst for both management and workers.

Although there are no real statistics on how many people have been fired for something they wrote on their personal Web logs, the stories keep coming:

A reporter in Dover, Del., was fired earlier this month 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? There was also "QueenofSky," a Delta flight attendant who was fired after she posed provocatively (she meant for it to be funny, she said) in her uniform. A Microsoft employee was canned after he posted a picture that included Macs the company had purchased. And of course there is blogger Heather B. Armstrong, who was fired in 2002 from her Web design job for writing about work and colleagues on her site, Dooce.com. That's where bloggers get the now-popular term, to be dooced: to be fired because of one's blog.

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.

But do companies really have to write a policy to explain something that might seem a no-brainer?"

One important question: Should an employer have the right to discipline free speech protected by the Constitution?

This is another example of how there is a growing sense of fascism in the workplace. Is it any wonder why those in business are among the supporters of the GOP and the Bush administration?