Blog-related firings prompt calls for better company policies

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Simonetti said she still doesn't know what she did wrong, saying that plenty of employee Web sites and dating profiles identify Delta and include photos in uniform.

"If there is a policy against this, why weren't all these people punished before?" she said.

Delta and Google officials would only say that Simonetti and Jen no longer worked for them.

In 1997, blogging pioneer Cameron Barrett lost a job at a small marketing firm in Michigan after co-workers stumbled upon "experimental" short stories from his creative writing class on his site. Now, he's much more cautious, and he suspended his blog while campaigning for Wesley Clark during the Democratic presidential primaries.

"I knew that everything I wrote would be scrutinized at (a) microscope level by the other campaigns and their supporters," Barrett wrote in an e-mail.

Annalee Newitz, a policy analyst at the civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said employees often "don't realize the First Amendment doesn't protect their job."

The First Amendment only restricts government control of speech. So private employers are free to fire at will in most states, as long as it's not discriminatory or in retaliation for whistle-blowing or union organizing, labor experts say.

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This was something of a worst-case-scenario for me for the two years that I was both teaching and blogging, occasionally on my school computer. Because schools are government run institutions, I'm not sure what my First Amendment rights in that situation were, but I didn't want to find myself in a position such that I would have to sue to get back a job I hated. So I never used my last name, and never mentioned the school, district, and town where I worked by name. That seemed to do the trick; nobody with any authority, to the best of my knowledge, ever found out about my radical ravings. By and large, I've carried that policy over to civilian life, and I think it makes good sense to do so. My rule is that, if it's not a public figure, I generally won't mention a person's name unless I'm praising him or her. After all, I don't want any trouble that I don't have to deal with unnecessarily.

But this AP story about fired bloggers brings up some bigger questions beyond simply trying to keep one's job. I'm a fierce believer in free speech, but I can imagine some scenarios where it would be reasonable to sack someone for what he wrote on his blog, divulging company secrets, for example, and I'm not talking about toxic-waste-in-the-children's-milk secrets, either. Actually I think a blogger has a moral obligation to divulge those kinds of secrets: what I mean is if sombody working for KFC posted their secret list of seven herbs and spices or somesuch. On the other hand, my fear as a teacher was that some psycho-fundamentalist parent, and there are seemingly thousands of those in Baytown, would freak out that somebody as liberal as me was teaching their children, and heavily pressure the powers that be to do something about it. Schools are very susceptible to parental pressure for just about any issue that happens to rear its head; my fears were reasonable. Under these hypothetical circumstances, firing me would have been absolutely outrageous. Ordering me to stop blogging would have been even worse.

Given that there are reasonable points of view on both sides of the issue, developing company policies for what is and is not acceptable blog fare, as well as establishing some blogger generated ethics for blogging in general, would not at all be a bad idea.

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