Omar posted a story on Slaw about a woman who called in sick (and apparently had to stay in the dark and couldn’t work on the computer) and was terminated after someone at her work noticed that she was on facebook. The company claimed that the trust in the employee had been destroyed and her employment could not longer continue.
Incidentally, she was not the first case of a questionable facebook-related action against employees. Last fall, an Australian man was denied sick pay after taking a sick day, but writing “[Kyle Doyle] is not going to work; f*ck it I’m still trashed. SICKIE WOO!” as his facebook status.
This raises serious questions about expectations of privacy. It is well known by now that anything done on computers at the office has no reasonable expectation of privacy. It makes sense therefore that if an employee is wasting company time by, say, surfing facebook, this can be grounds for disciplinary actions. But what if the employee is using their own computer (or, as the woman claimed, her iphone)?
The woman is outraged at what she calls “spying” by the company. But does the company have the right to do this? Assuming that this woman was getting paid for her sick days, she is still technically on company time. Perhaps the expectation of privacy rules should be redefined in terms of time, not in terms of which computer you are using. To use another example, would the company be justified in firing an employee who is wasting time on facebook while at the office…but is using a personal smartphone with a 3G connection instead of company computers? The effect is the same: time is wasted. Just something to think about.
I will say one thing though: if my employer starts tracking my facebook account in off-hours, I will not be happy. This falls under the “work-life balance” category.
***Entry updated due to inaccuracies in the original. Sorry.***
What’s missing from this story is: why was someone from this woman’s company tracking her Facebook profile? I suspect that the person who was tracking her was probably someone at the company who had become suspicious of the woman’s frequent? absences from work. This is the only way the tracking and the firing make sense: that the individual who caught her was tracking her as part of the tracker’s job description (like managment or security). Otherwise, one would think that the question would have been raised: And what was the tracker doing looking at Facebook profiles during work hours??
I think you have all missed the point.
She was fired because she lied to her employer about being sick. Whether she was on facebook, or at the mall shopping, or at a bar drinking, or at on the golf course, she is still misleading her employer and making use of sick days for an improper purpose.
Facebook is a public space much like the mall, the golf course or the bar. What is amazing is that there are so many people who don’t understand this.
Mitch Kowalski: it may be that she lied to her employer about being sick, but use of Facebook in her own home provides the employer with no proof that she lied about being at home convalescing.
All we have to go on in this story is the fact that she was “spotted” on Facebook while on a sick day. Despite Facebook’s public nature, this is *not* the same as being spotted at the golf course. A person can use Facebook while sick in a way that a person can’t play golf while sick. The only way the employer’s actions make sense is if they were the last in a series of established instances of dishonesty – but we have no information about that, so our discussion is about the the apparent firing of an employee for a single instance of Facebook use.
At best, her use of Facebook while on a sick day suggests that she wasn’t entirely disabled by her condition. One can reasonably ask for time off from work without being rendered insensible by one’s condition. If not, where do you draw the line? If Facebook is off limits, is MSN/Yahoo/Gmail Chat? How about text messaging? The telephone? Web browsing? Commenting on a blog?
If you don’t want to be fired…..the first thing to do is NOT lie to your boss.
I have no sympathy whatsoever. If she was dumb enough to post to Facebook, who would really want her working for them anyway?
JamesHalifax: Absolutely — don’t lie to your boss.
Posting to Facebook, in and of itself, would tell you nothing about the values or honesty of an employee. No more than posting comments at a website would, anyway. The content of the postings could tell you quite a bit, however.