Blogs May Be a Wealth Hazard

What do a flight attendant in Texas, a temporary employee in Washington and a web designer in Utah have in common? They were all fired for posting content on their blogs that their companies disapproved of.

The rise of blogging over the past few years has, inevitably, given way to another phenomenon, as companies are forced to confront employees' easy access to ranting and raving about work in public online forums like Blogger and LiveJournal.

While some companies like Sun Microsystems and Microsoft express blog-friendliness, for employees who are unaware of their company's stance on the practice or working at firms without clear policies, the consequences of posting work-related entries or photos can be sudden and shocking. This issue could be solved, experts say, with some policy tweaking.

Ellen Simonetti, the flight attendant in Texas, said she was suspended without pay, then benefits, and subsequently fired, by Delta Airlines this fall. Allegedly, her release was for posting photos of herself in uniform on her blog, which contained a mix of fact and fiction, she said. She'd never mentioned Delta by name as her employer, Simonetti said, and once Delta contacted her about the photos, she removed them from her site.

Simonetti said she has filed a discrimination complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and she's also trying to appeal to Delta to reclaim her job. She's not aware of any company policies regarding blogging, she said, and if Delta wants to fire her for violating uniform-use guidelines, there are plenty of others that should be let go, too.

"I just want fair treatment, you know?" she said.

Simonetti, like others who reported similar experiences, said if she'd known what the repercussions would be, she'd never have posted the photos.

Delta spokeswoman Benet Wilson said she couldn't say if the airline has any blogging policies, nor whether Simonetti was even an employee of Delta.

"All I can say about this is that we do not discuss internal company employee matters," she said.

Microsoft had a similar response when asked about Michael Hanscom, who had an experience similar to Simonetti's. Last October, he was working on Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus as a temp contracted to Xerox. One day, he saw some then-new Power Mac G5 computers being unloaded on site, and, tickled by the idea that Microsoft would be using Apple hardware, he snapped a photo and uploaded it to his blog.

"I didn't think it was much of a big deal at that point," Hanscom said.

Evidently, somebody disagreed, because four days later he was called into his manager's office and told that because he was hosting the photo on his own site, he couldn't be ordered to remove the offending photo, but he could be ordered off the property, as he soon was.

Hanscom said he wasn't given the option of removing the photo and keeping his job, and he's not sure how anyone found out about his blog post or how high up the managerial food chain the incident went.

He was told, however, the photo was considered a security violation because he wrote on the same page some details about where he took the photo and his office's proximity to the photo site, he said.