Beware, Blogger

Another case of a blogger being disciplined at work over a blog has hit the headlines.

An English secretary is bringing a test case under French labour law after allegedly being sacked for bringing her employers into disrepute by writing a “Bridget Jones in Paris” blog describing her everyday life.

Using the pseudonym La Petite Anglaise, she has attracted a sizeable international following for her musings on love, work and single motherhood in her internet diary.

Her blog postings, which are read by up to 3,000 people a day, do not reveal her own name, nor that of her French former boyfriend who is the father of her three-year-old daughter, and have never identified her employers.

But partners at the leading British accountancy firm Dixon Wilson alleged that she made herself and therefore the firm identifiable by including her own photograph on the weblog. They also complained that she used office time to work on it.

If Catherine’s blog was semi-anonymous before, it certainly isn’t now. Now, the whole world knows about Dixon Wilson and what a bunch of immature control freaks they are, too. I doubt this is the type of publicity they would choose but it is well deserved.

Catherine blogged semi-anonymously, as do most of us. It is, though, a simple matter to track down real names if people want to. This is a bit over the top, though. After all, a company has no rights over an employee’s private life. They would be perfectly justified if the blog libelled them, but it would appear that the entries are fairly innocent and little more than passing comment. Yes, you could, should you wish, make the effort to identify individuals, but there is nothing outrageous here, so why bother – and, importantly, why bother to make a fuss? But “gross misconduct”? Do me a favour!

Catherine is on sticky ground for using her work time to post entries, but that’s another matter; simple misuse of company time and resources and nothing to do with blogging per se and nothing that doesn’t happen in slack periods at any company from time to time. Or would Dixon Wilson prefer people to “look busy” even when they are not? Again, I detect an immature attitude to work life and relationships, not to mention poor personnel management techniques.

It’s much the same as with other cases like this; be careful what you say. I can see a time when employers try to impose embargoes on blogging in their contracts of employment. I had a similar type of imposition in my contract when I worked for the railway; restricting who I could talk to; namely, the press. That was fair enough. Talking to the press is likely to mean being misrepresented, so getting professional help from the company’s press officer first made sense anyway. Not that any journalists wanted to speak to me anyways…

Watch this space; employers have no compunctions when attempting to exert undue control over employees and that includes freedom of speech outside of work. Contracts of employment at their simplest are an exchange; time and expertise on the part of the employee for money and sometimes other benefits on the part of the employer. They do not confer any sort of ownership of the employee nor do they grant the employer any rights over what the employee gets up to in their own time, unless specifically included as a clause. That doesn’t stop some employers trying it on, though. Give the buggers a micron and they will take a parsec. I just hope Catherine wins her case. For all our sakes.