NEW YORK - Saying surfing the web is equivalent to reading a newspaper or talking on the phone, an administrative law judge has suggested that only a reprimand is appropriate as punishment for a city worker accused of failing to heed warnings to stay off the Internet.
Administrative Law Judge John Spooner reached his decision in the case of Toquir Choudhri, a 14-year veteran of the
Department of Education who had been accused of ignoring supervisors who told him to stop browsing the Internet at work.
The ruling came after Mayor Michael Bloomberg fired a worker in the city's legislative office in Albany earlier this year after he saw the man playing a game of solitaire on his computer.
In his decision, Spooner wrote: "It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work."
He added: "For this reason, city agencies permit workers to use a telephone for personal calls, so long as this does not interfere with their overall work performance. Many agencies apply the same standard to the use of the Internet for personal purposes."
Spooner dispensed the lightest possible punishment on Choudhri, a reprimand, after a search of Choudhri's computer files revealed he had visited several news and travel sites.
It seems more than a little ridiculous to me that an employer cannot dictate to an employee how their work computer should be used. The judge's reasoning - that some other employers allow employees to read newspapers and make personal phone calls at work - is ludicrous. If an employer doesn't want to allow employees to read newspapers at their desk, so be it. Same with personal calls and browsing the internet. There are good reasons for this, employee productivity and internet security risks not the least of them, but the bottom line is this: For better or worse it is the employer's decision to make. If the employee doesn't like it he/she should either convince the employer of the folly of the policy in question or find another place to work.
I strongly suspect that there is a union behind the above situation, and the fact that this employee (and the union that is probably backing him) won out should scare us all. In France there have been people rioting in the streets over the idea that their employers can fire them when they don't perform well or aren't needed. That may seem strange and crazy to those of us working here in America, but how far of a leap is it from telling an employer that they can't fire an employee for not following computer policies to telling an employer that they can't fire an employee for not doing a good enough job?
If we aren't careful unions, though our legislators and the court system, are going to bring the capitalist free economy that made this country great and strong to its knees.