Fired For Sending E-mail

[dArKeR]

 It's hard to imagine what we all did before e-mail. A recent estimate says 200 million of us will send more than 10 billion e-mails this year, most from the office. But what if we told you that not only does your company hase the right to monitor your emails and 60 percent of them do it?

Many of us have done it: received a joke, recipe or inspiration from a friend or coworker via e-mail.

Maybe you read it and hit delete. Maybe you forwarded it along to someone else.

Imagine being fired for such a thing. It's happening more and more often.

Two New Jersey women have discovered this hard fact through firsthand experience...

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/08/17/earlyshow/living/caught/main636589.shtml

AMERICA!

[physioex]

1. Yea....

Use your work email strictly for business. Have your own web email to do the other stuff..... It's plain common sense. But isn't it strange that they cannot tape your phone calls at work yet they can monitor email?

[XanaDUer]

2. Hmmmmm

One of Arace's e-mails was a picture of a bare-breasted woman with Hillary Clinton's head superimposed.


Freeper e-mailers?

[newsguyatl]

3. damn, that's frightening.

[CaTeacher]

4. I think it should be illegal for a company

to monitor your e-mail or internet usage unless they inform you that they are going to do so. If they tell you, and you are forewarned--then it is fair game. If not--they are invading your privacy. You would think they would have better things to do than spy on employees!

[Philostopher]

6. I think it is.

But they only have to tell you once, and they can bury it in your employee manual under something irrelevant, probably, and still be within the law.

[2Design]

7. when you walk through the door, it is their system. They own it

and anything on it. Those are the rules.

[salvorhardin]

5. It's not just e-mail

Long before e-mail was so widespread companies were using their employees own computers to spy on them. Keystrokes are monitored so as to log avg. keystrokes/min. and other data which may then be used in job performance evaluations, tech support workers have their call lengths monitored, etc.

All of this is, of course, in the name of increasing job performance and efficency.

E-mail is a little different as it can be used to transmit sensitive company information and is therefore a potential legal liability, but then so do the 3 martini executive power lunches.

The best rule of thumb to use is, don't send or receive personal information using company hardware or resources. If it can be monitored, it will be monitored.

[chaska]

8. I've seen it happen. Check this out:

I worked for a publishing company in Seattle. The company president was a total pug bitch. Everybody in the company hated her but especially the front office. There was one guy who sent an email calling her a bitch and she was snooping (reading employee emails) and called him in and fired him.

A short period of time later he killed himself. He was at some stage of dying of AIDS, I should note.

[Tempest]

9. Company clearly was in the right to fire at least one of them

"One of Arace's e-mails was a picture of a bare-breasted woman with Hillary Clinton's head superimposed."

That violates several long-standing company policies nationwide.