I’ve written before on the dangers of blogging. In a right-to-work state, employers are free to hire and fire at will. Meaning, they can fire employees for actions performed in and outside the workplace. And that includes what one posts over a web log. Unless one works for the government, one has no constitutional protection of free speech in the private sphere. Employers can and usually do regulate speech (sexual harassment rules, confidentiality agreements, media contact protocol, etc…). One wrong word and one may be terminated for conflicting with a company’s interests.
Some, like the Delta flight attendant who was fired after posting photos on her web log, have implied (and sometimes argued) that blogs represent a new unregulated and threatening freedom for employees and that employers will move quickly to strike down any potential for embarrassment by regulating or prohibiting participation in web logs.
That has probably happened in some cases. But it appears that most employers have embraced the existence of blogs (when corporate behemoths like IBM sponsor multiple blog sites, there’s nothing cutting edge about web logs anymore) hoping they can somehow cash in on this new medium. Similarly, they appear to have accepted the fact that a great many employees maintain blog sites away from work. And most employers are not in the business of maliciously complicating their employee’s lives - they simply are looking to protect their own interests.
In fact, most employers are responding the phenomenon of web logs by creating or adapting fairly relaxed policy standards that apply a number of common sense rules to the practice. Those policies range from requiring that nothing be said of where one works, to requiring that one limit what one says about the company, to posting a disclaimer that one’s views do not in any way represent the views of the organization. In most cases, these policies are just an extension of the policy that one is representing the company whether on or off the clock. As such, and despite the hand-wringing over the last few years, it appears that very few companies are interested in the more Draconian measures of which they are sometimes accused.
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