Facebook Firings

On a Saturday morning in October 2010, Mariana Cole-Rivera, a domestic violence advocate at the group Hispanics United of Buffalo, began the Facebook thread that would get her fired. She wrote, “Lydia Cruz, a coworker feels that we don’t help our clients enough at HUB. I about had it! My fellow coworkers how do you feel?”

Within minutes, HUB colleagues began posting supportive comments. “What the Hell,” wrote one, “we don’t have a life as is, What else can we do???”

“I think we should give our paychecks to our clients so they can ‘pay’ the rent,” said another, “also we can take them to their Dr’s appts, and served as translators (oh! We do that).”

By Tuesday, Cole-Rivera and four of the co-workers who’d responded to her had lost their jobs. Their boss said their Facebook thread violated HUB’s harassment policy by disparaging a co-worker. The workers took their case to the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency charged with interpreting and enforcing U.S. labor law. A judge sided with them, but now the case is on appeal, and it’s poised to help answer a question for the socially networked era: Which Facebook posts can get you fired? As more and more of our daily speech migrates online, business groups are hoping that the NLRB will make it easier for employers to control that speech. It shouldn’t.

I read the cases cited in the full article, and I have mixed feelings.  The things these people said were stupid, thoughtless and often extremely derogatory.  If you call your boss an asshole to his face, you would expect to be fired on the spot (unless you have the coolest boss in the world).  Saying it on Facebook should be no exception, especially because you have the ability to protect that post from the public, or from mutual friends, or think better and not post it at all.

We all say things on Facebook we shouldn't, some people do it daily, others save it for a gloriously craptastic special occasion.  This issue is so avoidable and the examples so over the top, I find myself lacking in pity for the "victims" of employers who refuse to have sensitive information or public sparring out there to mar them forever.  

The one case I find interesting involves a man whose discussion was protected by a judge, but a different post making fun of an accident (granted, poor taste but still) got him fired.  Now that could be grounds for exploration and drawing lines of common sense.

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