Attacking Employers Online Can Be Risky Business
05 August 2008 - James Courtnedge
The case of the Avonmouth postal worker dismissed for posting comments about Royal Mail bosses on a postal workers forum called Royalmailchat, has opened a rather complex can of worms. Theres plenty of talk of 'Free Speech' and indeed the principle is even covered in the European Convention on Human Rights, but do we really have free speech and where does that right end?
We certainly have freedom of thought, probably the lastion bastion untouched by taxation, but political correctness has dramatically shaped what we can say, what we can write about, and thats on top of all the usual hazards such as libel and defamation. That said, there are still those that insist that 'free speech' has absolutely no bounds and if we want to slate our employer for instance, on our own time, then thats fine - isn't it?
Well, no its not actually. Whilst most people would uphold the right to speak freely, theres a fine line between fair comment and libel and some comment can be seen as commercially damaging too.
Lets be hypothetical here and say you had opened a shop in the High Street. You take on perhaps four members of staff who you hope will greet customers, sell hard and generally represent the business on a daily basis. After a few months you discover that one of your employees is posting derogatory or even untrue comments about you and the way you run the business. As an employer, wouldn't you be just a tad put out that you were paying this assistant a weekly wage and yet they were posting damning comments that your customers could read?
The fact is, the internet is very much part of the publishing world and whilst it might be seen as a 'free for all' by many, each country has its own limitations in terms of what is reasonable and employers can and do exercise that right. Bloggers who have defamed their employers and been dismissed or been made the subject of court cases, make it plain that the internet is by no means a safe haven for disgruntled employees.
The European Convention on Human Rights (article 10) states that: "Everyone has the right of freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without inference by public authority and regardless of frontiers."
There is however an important 'get out' clause:
"The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."
Its worth highlighting these two statements:
"The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities" and "for the protection of the reputation or rights of others" which even without a clear case of libel could be sufficient for any employer to come down hard on an employee, plus there are often conditions of employment that employees are required to sign, some of which extend to activities outside working hours.
Royal Mail still, as far as I know, also requires employees to sign the Official Secrets Act, and this in itself may place additional responsibilities on employees beyond working hours.
If you've got this far, and I haven't even touched libel or the more recent blocking of 'hate speech', its fairly obvious that free speech does have real boundaries and they can vary from one EU country to another, even if a broad and rather ambigous principle was established as part of the European Convention.
Even where an employee manages to escape all these pitfalls, it seems a foregone conclusion that when redundancies are made or mail centres scaled down, the chances of that employee retaining their job would be slim at best. The pressure on bloggers and forum owners to remove comments that could be construed as libellous or break some other law, increases year on year, and employers seem to be winning in most cases. Losing a job can be bad enough, but the costs involved in some of these cases can be astronomical too.
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