The Pendragon's Hall

Given my recent history, I thought maybe I'd talk a bit about the bloggers who were recently fired for blogging about their jobs--one, a flight attendent, for showing somewhat risque photos of her in company uniform, and two, a commentary on his own job. Given all the talk about freedom of speech and suchlike these days, usually commentaries on this could fall into two camps: the liberals, who are divided, because on the one hand they don't like the free speech of the internet, but on the other they do say anyone should be able to say what they want regardless; or the conservatives, who generally think that speech should be held in by responsibility but who generally don't approve of government restriction of free speech that isn't indecent.

I am torn to decide what I think. Obviously, I believe in free speech. It is in the Constitution first thing, so the Founders thought it was important. And since these people weren't using company time to blog, which is what I originally thought from the headlines, it seems they should be allowed to write what they want on their own time. I did not see the pictures, but apparently a few of them showed her bra strap. I'm not hugely in favor of this of course, but it's not like she was the first. Go to AIM.com and you'll see plenty of such pictures and these people are not censured. But the fact remains: She was using her company uniform to sell herself. What the company probably objected to was her risque pictures using their uniform. This seems reasonable to me.

The harder one is the case of the guy criticizing his company. But even here I can cut some slack. The Constitution says "Congress" shall not abridge freedom of speech or of the press (whichever you would call this) and a later amendment (the 14th) has been interpreted to mean that state governments must not do this. But the Constitution does not prohibit private corporations from dismissing employees for any and every reason. Only recently has it become fashionable to claim that corporations somehow owe it to their employees to let them say whatever they want. Now, I know the first objection to be raised will be, what if something unethical is going on and the employees want to speak out? Well, what if? They can still speak out and indeed they should, but they should also remember that they will probably be fired and they can't appeal to some kind of right of freedom of speech to protect them from that, because they simply don't have one that is guaranteed by anything binding in a court of law. Many companies do have policies of not basing the offer of a job on, you know the drill, "race, ethnicity, religion," or what have you. Shooting off at the mouth isn't one on the list that I've ever seen though. And constant complaining about the job lowers job performance. Trust me; I know.

I don't know that this is what happened here. The story on CNN was pretty bare on details, but while freedom of speech, especially on the internet, is protected from government interference, I think from what I can tell that these people did do something that their company was entitled, not obligated though, to enforce penalty on. And one never even knows. The firings may have had nothing to do with blogging: people trying to elicit sympathy for their cause will often claim they were fired, or not hired in the first place, because of something like this. I read once where someone disobeyed the rules clearly set down by an organization and was rejected for a top job, and then complained it was because he had "liberal progressive" ideas. Somehow I doubt it.