Comment by Crouching Hamster (Guest)

Crouching Hamster (Guest) — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 02:00:07 +0000

Nice analysis.
I am thinking about blogging/getting dooced/ where do we go from here ...

You can fire someone for any reason or no reason at all, as long as you don't fire them on the basis of their sex, race, color, religion, or national origin. That's protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (Back when I was in law shcool, most states, and certainly the feds, did not protect non-heterosexuals from getting fired for being non-heterosexual. That's right. You're gay? You're fired. Sadly, it's still true in most states and smaller cities. And back in the day, you could get fired for getting pregnant.) We also have the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, protecting workers 40 and older, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, and the ADA.

What if you SAID something about your employer or even about yourself, say, at YOUR dinner party, in YOUR home, and it got back to the employer. And your employer fired you. No protection there.

I can't envision a special protection for free speech or blogging. It would be nice, and it's certainly less controversial in this administration than being gay, but I don't see it happening.

Personally, I think any employer/employee relationship in this "employment at will" country is tenuous, unless you're a tenured professor or a federal judge. I'm always anxious when I have a job. I'm equally as anxious when I don't have a job!

(Someone correct me if I'm wrong on this stuff. It's been a while.)

Comment by pinky (Guest)

pinky (Guest) — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 00:14:44 +0000

I don't know that she was dooced, exactly - didn't she go right to her next job? She already knew it wasn't a particularly stable household.

It's not the firing (god, I've read too much about this today) that most people seem to be all het up about, it's the fact that insecure bitch of an ex-employer wrote about it in the damn NYT.

The Drama!

Ken — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 23:22:07 +0000

It is all over the blogosphere now: the saga of the nanny who was fired because her employer read her blog.