Nine city employees in Washington DC were fired for looking at porn at work.
Now before your knee jerk reaction is to say that it was an accident, someone gave them a link that said low mortgage rates and it was actually porn, or they typed ESPN wrong or someone else used their computer, read the whole story.
The investigation started in January 2007 after an employee at the office of property management complained about a co-worker.
The city then began an investigation of about 10,000 city computers (a third of the total).
They found 9 employees who clicked on porn sites or images at least 19,000 times in 2007.
One employee visited porn sites 39,000 times last year, more than 150 times a day.
Thankfully there was not on instance of someone looking at child porn, especially relieving because one of the dirty dozen (ok, it was only 9) worked at the department of child and family services.
Here's the most disturbing part of the story to me: they are all union workers and are entitled to an appeal. If a union leader actually defends these people it would demonstrate everything that is wrong with labor unions in this country.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
From what little I know about the NLRA, policies prohibiting the use of computer for certain activities have to be enforced in a nondiscriminatory manner. I would argue that if other city workers visited other leisure websites in the same frequency and nothing was done to them, then these dirty nine are being unfairly treated. The issue comes down to how you classify the porn sites, classifying them as offensive material is what the city will try to do and argue that they enforce their policy equally against employees accessing offensive material. The defense will more broadly classify the material to encompass other material that they know the city does not equally prevent employees from accessing. Should be an interesting cases if good lawyers are involved. Will this go before the NLRB?
You see what the MLPA defends baseball players for, anything and everything.
Because the employee pays dues, he or she is entitled to defense typically in Union scenarios. We'll have to see.
Uncle Concierge, are you saying that these people are being discriminated against because their preferred form of entertainment is porn while others who may prefer sports or entertainment news get away with wasting time at work?
Jems, I understand that technically they are entitled to a defense but just once it would be nice to hear someone say "what you did was so indefensible that you deserve this punishment."
Post a Comment