Can You Lose Your Job For Blogging?
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In this day and age with protections in place to protect our freedom to speech, one needs to wonder just how far someone can go when blogging on the Internet. The classic case of an employee losing his job is the case of Mark Jen, who worked a total of 10 days before being terminated by Google. It seems that Jen had used Google’s own Blogger.com to allegedly complain about his employer.
Than there is the case of Ellen Simonetti who was canned by Delta Airlines for blogging about her jog as a stewardess. Oops. Flight attendant. We must be PC. Anyway Ellen blabbed about her job and Delta apparantely didn’t like what she said. Out she went, blog and all.
We also have the story about a Microsoft subcontractor, who lost his contract after he posted pictures oh his blog, of Apple computers being delivered to the Redmond empires main campus. 
So what do you think? Are you protected by first amendment rights if you bad mouth your boss on your blog? Or can corporate America kick your ass out the front door?
Comments welcome.
[Sources for this article available at wikipedia or via Google search]
8 Comments
Navin
June 7th, 2008
at 7:38am
U may want to know abt Gaurav Sabnis, indian blogger who lost his job, or rather resigned under pressure from his employer IBM coz he voiced his opinion criticizing an institute (IIPM) which was a customer of IBM’s laptops for its students. The college threathned to make a bonfire of all their swanky IBM laptops if Gaurav didn’t take back and apologise, or got fired.
In the end the only thing this managed to achieve, was to bring, perhaps millions of Indian bloggers like myself, speaking out, asking for our right to speech to not be suppressed!!
Ron Schenone
June 7th, 2008
at 7:52am
Hi Navin,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Alex - Blog.exe creator
June 7th, 2008
at 1:39pm
Wow - that’s a damned right disgrace! Where is the justice in getting fired by simply stating your opinions? I can see why if someone is saying how much they hate their job, the company would see this as they are not pulling their weight at the their job, after all you have to have a positive attitude towards your job. But for that, i don’t think it is right to fire them! Maybe the companies should talk to the emplyee and make it better.
Also, you are entitled to say whatever you think about someone or something. Just because someone doesn’t like your opinions does not give them the right to fire you!
Ryan
June 7th, 2008
at 5:16pm
The First Amendment says the government won’t silence you….aside from the fact that it’s a lie (DMCA), it never said that your employer has to tolerate you smearing crap on them, you would have to be down right stupid to get on the internet, use your own name or information that personally identifies you (with a passing glance by a coworker, not a court order), and start trash talking your boss or something, you would think that working for Google, he would have understood that anything he wrote about could easily be seen by anyone.
So moral of the story, if you hate your job and need to vent, either take it elsewhere or don’t make it so obvious that it’s you that did it.
Ron Schenone
June 7th, 2008
at 5:40pm
It would seem kind of silly to use your own name.
Kevin Bailey
June 9th, 2008
at 12:01pm
Ron it would seem even sillier to use your own employers free blogging tool to do it. They don’t even need the court order to see who you are since you essentially walked into the hallway outside the bosses office and started trash talking in a loud voice!!
Ron Schenone
June 9th, 2008
at 1:11pm
Hi Kevin,
So true!
amanda
July 10th, 2008
at 10:42pm
Unless you live in Montana or Arizona, a boss can fire you for no real reason at all, if they don’t like you outside of work, they can fire you.