Mission Creek

from cio.com

This is the increasingly blurry line between the private use of computers at the workplace. Though the corporations are squarely in their legal rights, many people view computers and the internet as an increasingly personal extension and many will balk at this strict legal construction.

A large chunk of employers are letting staffers go for violations of computer and Web communications policies, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The news comes from the 2006 Workplace E-Mail, Instant Messaging and Blog survey from the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute, according to the Journal.

The survey found that more than a quarter of the employers queried had fired an employee for violating company e-mail policy, up 9 percent from the 17 percent of employers who let employees go for similar violations in 2001, the Journal reports. On top of this finding, the survey also said that 2 percent of respondents had fired workers for instant-message correspondences that weren’t appropriate, and another 2 percent of employers said they’d fired a staffer for posting distasteful content on a Web log—or blog—be it their professional or personal page, according to the Journal.

full story here