Police blotter: Ex-employee faces suit over file deletion

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Creating a Climate of Fear

It is unethical management that creates a workplace environment similar to a prison because this hinders the free expression of thought necessary for democracy. There must be more to this story.

Nonetheless, undeleting files to determine if an employee has been doing wrong even if finding something does not prove anything. All of us get updates from our network administrators and Microsoft and our Internet access providers and hence none of us have control over what is on the hard drives.

Consider the following:

http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=computerporn19e&date=20060819&query=DSHS+pornography

The more complete story is that two state of Washington employees pissed off someone who reported them to the State Auditors office claiming they were using state equipment inappropriately. They might have embarassed the fellow during a sailboat race or at an elks club meeting or infront of their spouse, it might have nothing to do with the workplace. However...

Usually these kinds of things are related to politics and in the pre-computer days the same kind of thing involved telephony.

Workers with hours of phone calls per day might be organizing for a candidate, or gathering data on behalf of a candidate but in anycase doing activity that was not personal, not professional, perhaps partially those but primarily political. Even if the individual were salaried and made the calls outside of work hours at no addtional cost to the state it would be a problem.

The DSHS worker on administrative leave from the URL is perplexing to me because for at least 3 years DSHS workers and every state worker have known that pornography viewing on the job gets you fired. You just about have to decide to be a test case to do so.

Note: the last time I checked pornography on the Internet wasn't illegal. Empoyers can block access to those sites without much problem and the libraries and colleges provide equipment at no charge for doing so. For that matter those scanty clad models in the pop up adds are close to pornographic. But in anycase what 67,000 per yera computer jock is going to be so stupid to do so?

One of the accused retains his or her job. That one loaded unathorized software allowing him/her to store photographs for a screen saver. The idea that this is wrong is not supportable unless those photos are part of a backup strategy, in which case, yes a gig of photos is a no no.

So the computer jock, who maintains he didn't look at porn using state equiment, will get his job back and keep his pay from may through august. Fine work State Auditor.

Posted by: mighetto   Posted on: 08/21/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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