Any update on the fired DUer?

[Bunny]

I know he's not supposed to be posting, but does anyone have contact with him? Any update on his legal status?

[Bunny]

1. kick

[placton]

2. more info please?

I'd not heard about this.

[Bunny]

5. Read this (if you have an extra few hours!):

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=1764027

[tigereye]

6. I remember seeing this

NPR seems to be running scared about any appearance of "bias" ( read lefty-bias), plus it also looks like this guy didn't protect his anonymity enough. That's a shame. Haven't seen anything more about this. When I worked for organizations, we had limited internet acess and that was, in retrospect, probably a good thing.

Hi Bunny! Enjoying your summer?

[Bunny]

7. So far so good, tigereye!

How about you? I haven't managed to get to a Pirates game yet, but I will soon!

[tigereye]

16. The arts festival was spectacular!

they had great music. We went to several concerts (including my favorite, Patti Smith!) and also saw Lob Lobos at Hartwood Acres.

[Political_Junkie]

3. I'll give it a kick for ya too, bunny.

:kick:

[bbernardini]

4. Another kick.

I have no life, so I have to live through the trials of others. :)

[seabeyond]

8. lol lol

funny you, just a helpful kick. i too am curious. last i heard he was silence from talking cause the station is private owned though they act like a public station i believe, so his right to speak out was squelched or something, dont quote me on this

[ixion]

9. kickarooni

cause I'm curious. I worked in a pretty conservative shop for a few years, but I still posted on DU. I always wondered if they saw my posts in the network logs.

I feel bad for this guy. That sucks.

:kick:

[Hekate]

10. The equipment and products thereof belong to the bosses--sorry

I'm amazed, after all the various scandals in the newspaper involving e-mails circulating on company-owned PCs and generated on company time, that anyone with a PC or Mac on their work-desk still thinks their e-mails (or DU postings, or Amazon purchases, or visits to porn sites) are private.

No, they are not. It doesn't matter whether we agree with the policy or not, the fact is that all such activities can be enumerated, quantified, read, and traced. Just as fair warning it should be in every employee's manual, printed in bold face caps.

If your employer is mellow and your usage discreet, you can get away with it. My sister (a tech writer with a lot of latitude about how she paces her time) almost always corresponds from her desk. A data entry person whose every keystroke is timed would not be able to. A friend of mine who is a medical clerk has been reprimanded (I think formally) and now confines her usage to her lunch hour, which is still iffy -- I think she should just bite the bullet and get her own hookup at home, because she needs this job as much as she needs to be an activist.

This has been tested in the courts many times by now. I'm just really sorry our DU friend found this out the hard way, and I hope that after the dust has settled he finds a good new job.

Hekate

[seabeyond]

11. hekate, from what i understand wasnt at work

we all understand if it was during work hour that would be a whole other thing, but, he was talking about the company. a freeper saw it investigated and sent 7 emails to the 7 radio stations in the area. the station manager he was working for went into the thread and read the message

[Hekate]

15. If you are right, then he was well and truly shafted

Shee-it. If that's the case, he should definitely see a lawyer!

I based my comments on my memory of the original threads, which were extensive. I came away with the impression that our DUer had been posting from work -- if I'm wrong about that, I apologize for piling on.

As for my tone (mentioned in another post in this thread) -- what I say has nothing to do with sympathy for our corporate masters, it's simply a reality check, and Hekate gets grumpy sometimes.

The deck is stacked against us, but a lot of the info about it is actually in writing. We need to know this stuff in order to protect ourselves from formal reprimand or worse, if nothing else. There are jobs I wouldn't take unless I was starving, among them postal sorting and airline reservations, both of which are paced by machinery -- kind of like white collar chicken processors, if you know what I mean. The oppression can take more benign forms, such as the large university (where I used to work) where department heads could, if they wanted to, forbid all personal telephone calls. The Librarian chose to implement this heartless policy, forcing the mothers of school-age kids (a majority of the librarians and library assistants were women) to phone home from a pay phone on their 15 minute afternoon break -- this being before cell phones.

Organize. Unionize. Believe it.

Hekate

[welshTerrier2]

13. freedom of speech versus an honest day's work

first, let me say that i don't know the facts of this situation ... my response to your email is more of a generic nature ...

absent the details, i disagree with the tone of your post ...

specifically, i think a differentiation must be made between a company's objecting to an employee conducting private business on company time as opposed to a company objecting to the thoughts and writings of an employee expressed on company time ... for example, let's say there were numerous other severe violations by many employees who conducted personal business on company time and that this was an isolated incident with the employee in question ... i understand any employee can be fired without cause but it seems to me this should be construed as a violation of free speech if the evidence showed it was "what" the employee said rather than "when" he said it ...

my emphasis here is not to argue the law as it might be but rather argue the law as it should be ... your post appears far too sympathetic to the corporate bureaucracy ... yes, it is wrong to conduct private business on company time ... but it seems to me a much greater wrong to create an environment that the nature of what someone writes on a website becomes the basis for their dismissal ... your post showed no sensitivity to this important distinction ...

[Endangered Specie]

12. The thread that contained the 'updated news' was deleted.

Apparently... the fired DUer could get in legal trouble if he speaks out.

[Kathy in Cambridge]

14. Wow, what BS. They fire him AND prevent him from exercising freedoms

:wtf: