By Cheyne Ordonio | Editor-in-Chief
Perhaps I crossed a line. Perhaps I’ll cross it again. That’s the great thing about freedom of speech, right? You can declare the President a communist, call the Governor an idiot, and protest homosexuals at soldiers’ funerals (really?). You’ll never have to worry about Mr. Hussein Obama‘s secret police coming to shut down your Facebook page (watch out for Bank of America though).
But maybe you’re like me and many others whose frustrations increasingly stem from where we work. Make a Facebook comment that you’re mad at your boss for your lack of hours, bash a customer who treated you like the help, or do like I did and make a picture of Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) urinating on your company’s logo. You just might find your right to self expression has some serious limitations in Corporate America.
That’s because our First Amendment rights only protect us from reprisals from the government, even though our employers may seem to have as much, if not more, influence on our lives. It’s an influence that gets a little creepy when you learn some stranger in Human Resources is trolling your Facebook page and letting your boss know what you’re doing. But I guess that’s the price I pay for $9.13 an hour.
Fortunately for me, I only got a stern warning that the company didn’t find my picture funny and ordered me to take it down. For $35 a week, it’s a warning I take very seriously. But many others haven’t been so fortunate.
Thirteen employees of Virgin Atlantic were fired for calling passengers “chavs,” the UK equivalent of “white trash,” in a Facebook discussion. Ashley Johnson, a waitress for the pizza restaurant Brixx, was fired for posting profanity and calling customers “cheap” after they caused her to stay an extra three hours at work and only left a $5 tip. And Kimberley Swann, an office administrator, was canned for posting that her new job was “boring” after her first day.
But an incident reported in the Time article “Can You Be Fired for Bad-Mouthing Your Boss on Facebook?” brought to light some protections regarding what we can put on Facebook about our jobs. Dawnmarie Souza was fired from American Medical Response of Connecticut Inc. after she went on a profanity riddled tirade about her boss on Facebook when her boss refused to let her have a union representative present when being questioned about a customer complaint.
The National Labor Relations Board investigated the case and argued that according to the Federal National Labor Relations Act of 1978, employees can’t be punished for talking about wages, workplace conditions, or forming unions. The outcome of the out-of-court settlement is unclear, but the company agreed to change its Internet policy “to ensure that they do not improperly restrict employees from discussing their wages, hours and working conditions with co-workers and others while not at work.” Souza did not return to the company.
Of course there’s always the simple solution for staying out of trouble; use “common sense” and don’t put anything on Facebook your boss won’t like. But “Common Sense” is for Glenn Beck fans and he’s a moron. So I’ll stick with uncommon sense, like my picture. To the average stranger trolling my Facebook page, it looks like a very crude disrespectful depiction of the hand that feeds me (on a budget of $10 a week). And I must admit it came out of a little frustration when I saw I didn’t get any hours at work that week. But its real meaning is self-reassurance that no matter how hard things get, I still have dignity and self-worth. I love where I work, if I still get to.
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