Blogger sacked by Waterstones

Please give us an email address we can send our protests to.

I’m not going to comment on the specifics of the case, because I haven’t read enough about it, but if every employer sacked every employee who slagged off their boss in public, there’d be full unemployment. Also, it seems a bit odd for someone so keen on sci-fi and graphic novels to work in Waterstones. They are terrible for those genres. The only store I’ve ever seen with a halfway decent collection is the Piccadilly megastore. Even that has just a small rack for graphic novels, considerably smaller than the Charing Cross Rd Borders or Foyles collections. Why not Borders, or somewhere dedicated like Comic Book Showcase or Forbidden Planet?

Casting all of this as a ‘free speech’ issue seems silly. At least here in the US, the right of free speech has to do with government restraint — it doesn’t guarantee your right to say anything you like and have nobody take that into account.

Apart from the case not pertaining to the US (and why would you write “here” in the US on a site that’s not “here in the US”?), this issue does have to do with free speech and its protection. I am not someone who liberally slings the term “censorship” around, but in the UK (and many other places “here” in Europe), a company must provide a good, legally sanctioned reason to fire an employee. That’s where the state comes in. So, yes, it’s about free speech, once removed.

Interesting in this context is this bit from BBC Scotland featuring Tom at Random Acts of Reality, and an anti-blog employer, who actually says things like “if they work for me, they can’t have a blog” (not even, “can’t write about my company on their blog”).

We’re getting these knee-jerk reactions to cases like this in complete ignorance of what was written.

Actually the ignorance technically speaking is yours – if you had followed the link to the Guardian story, you’d have seen they print at the bottom of the page the blog posts in question.

Which is only obvious because it is part of the story they are writing about.

Have read a little more, and it seems the company fired the employee with no warning and no due process, which gives him a very strong case for unfair dismissal. The company would have to prove gross misconduct, which would be hard in the circumstances. A friend who happens to be a union rep at Waterstones thinks the company hasn’t got a leg to stand on. He would say that though.

Apart from the case not pertaining to the US (and why would you write “here” in the US on a site that’s not “here in the US”?)

Uh, maybe because I’m here in the US? I could have just said ‘in the US’ but in that case I could have been someone from anywhere commenting about the US.

And what does it mean to say that the site is not ‘here in the US’. As far as I can tell, the site is not anywhere in particular in physical space–it’s a group blog whose bloggers are from various countries (including the US).

As for not pertaining — issues of speech and employment law are definitely pertinent to the US. There have been similar cases here.

I am not someone who liberally slings the term “censorship” around, but in the UK (and many other places “here” in Europe), a company must provide a good, legally sanctioned reason to fire an employee.

Then it is about employment law, not censorship. But it would seem very odd that publicly bashing one’s employer would not be grounds for termination (and by publicly, I mean intentionally ‘published’ writing on a web site accessible anywhere on the planet–not just a comment accidentally overheard at a coffee shop). Or do we think opinions published on blogs are of no consequence?

So, yes, it’s about free speech, once removed.

Once removed? In other words — not really about free speech or censorship.

This particular blog, reading back, ranges over a variety of subjects, but he does talk about work sometimes. That’s become a recognizable species of blog, the “workplace blog”, with many of them operating in a kind of Dilbert-Office Space-The Office domain, telling tales of dysfunctional work cultures.

Given how much of a genre this has become, it’s reasonable to expand beyond this individual case and begin to ask, “How in general should employers react to the ‘workplace blog’?” I think many of us would concede that if a workplace blog became an active assault on a company as a whole, or exposed major proprietary information without any end besides malice, it would cross a line that would justify the employer responding harshly.

But that’s not the case here, and it’s generally not the case with workplace blogs. A well-run front office should have nothing to fear from an ordinary workplace blog–in fact, they ought to welcome them. They don’t have any impact on how customers feel about the business as a whole, and they provide the kind of window into how the business is functioning on a day-to-day basis that upper management can’t get any other way. That’s the optimistic argument.

But even if upper management can’t see the value in encouraging honesty (and as Joe Gordon observes, also in the cathartic value of getting employees to vent *away* from the office) there’s a bottom floor issue. Namely, that a free society needs to allow people to speak their minds about everything, especially including what happens to them for the eight hours (or more) of the day that they go to work. The right to protect corporate image and proprietary data needs to be an extremely narrowly construed right. Haven’t we seen that in the last five years of corporate scandal, that allowing companies to exert broad controls over the information they release to the public sphere is a recipe for disaster? Even a hardcore free-market advocate or libertarian needs to see information as one of the few things that companies should not be allowed to control tightly, both for the sake of free speech in general and for the sake of the functioning of markets in specific.

If you blog about your employer in a way which is recognisable, then yes, you should be vulnerable if you damage the company. Biting the hand that feeds.

But if you don’t damage the company, or the place is not recognisable, then you surely must be free to do what you want.

I must say this seems like a fabulous opportunity for Joe to get a job that fits his obsessions and talents.

“If you blog about your employer in a way which is recognisable, then yes, you should be vulnerable if you damage the company. Biting the hand that feeds.”

There’s libel laws for that. Although, obviously, if you can prove libel you can prove gross misconduct.

“Even a hardcore free-market advocate or libertarian needs to see information as one of the few things that companies should not be allowed to control tightly, both for the sake of free speech in general and for the sake of the functioning of markets in specific.”

Any self-respecting hardcore libertarian should be familiar with Celine’s Second Law: “Accurate communication is only possible in a non-punishing situation”. In other words:

“This is a very simple statement of the obvious, and means no more than that everybody tends to lie a little, to flatter or to protect themselves, when dealing with those who have power over them, especially the power to punish. (this is why communication between parents and children is notoriously befoolzled).
Every authoritarian structure can be visualized as a pyramid, with very few at the top and very many at the bottom, as in the flowchart of any corperation or bureaucracy. On each rung, participants bear a burden of nescience in relation to those above them. That is, they must be very, very careful that their natural sensory activities as conscious organisms—the acts of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, drawing inferences from perception, etc.—be in accord with the wishes of those above them. This is absolutely vital; job security depends on it. It is much less important—a luxury that can easily be discarded—that these perceptions be in accord with actual reality.
For instance, in the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, the agent had to develop the capacity to see godless communists everywhere. Any agent whose perceptions indicated that there were actually very few godless communists anywhere in this country would experience what psychologists call cognitive dissonance: his or her reality grid was at variance with the official reality grid of the pyramidal authority structure. To talk about such
divergent perceptions at all would be to invite suspicions of eccentricity, of intellectual wiseacreing, or of being oneself a godless communist. The same would apply to any Dominican Inquisitor of earlier centuries who lacked the capacity to see witches everywhere. In such authoritarian situations, it is important to see what the authorities see; it is inconvenient, and possibly dangerous, to see what is actually there.
But this leads to an equal and opposite burden of omniscience on those at the top, in the Eye of the authoritarian pyramid. All that is forbidden to those at the bottom—the conscious activities of perception and evaluation—is demanded of the master classes, the elite and the super-elite. They must attempt to do the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking,
and decisionmaking for the whole society.
But a man with a gun (the power to punish) is told only what his target thinks will not cause him to pull the trigger. The
elite, with their burden of omniscience, face the underlings, with their burden nescience, and receive only the feedback
consistent with their own preconceived notions. The burden of omniscience becomes, in short, another and more complex burden of nescience. Nobody really knows anything anymore, or if they do, they are careful to hide the fact.”

maybe a bright side to all of this is that an enterprising sf publisher or promotional company could enlist joe’s services, and promote him beyond booksalesman.

although i tend to agree with mw on the legal aspects of this, there’s no question that this was a stupid move by waterstone’s. hopefully joe can make the best of it, because i doubt he’ll get his old job back.

Jacob’s final point seems to hit on the crux of the matter. Whether or not the firing was illegal is a point of U.K. law I’m utterly unqualified to speak to. Reasonable people can disagree about the wisdom and justice of the law, but that debate is orthogonal to the question of whether the law ought to be applied in this case.

But all that stuff is irrelevent to the boycott question. Those of us who substantively value free and open speech and expression ought to be prepared to fight for it on multiple fronts. To the extent that governments restrict or violate it in opposition to their own laws, we should oppose such activities through legal means (and other means as well). To the extent that the chilling effect on free and open speech is coming from a non-state entity that isn’t violating any laws, we’ll have to adapt different tactics. The opponents of free speech do this through boycotts of advertisers of speech they don’t like. If we value a substantive culture of free speech, defending the first amendment won’t be sufficient. We’ll need to fight these tendencies on their own turf, using appropriate methods. That seemed clear enough to me.

There’s a place for everything and everything should be in it’s place. Freedom of speech is entirely proper and well-suited to owners of property; when it is granted to the parasitic propertyless, it leads only to chaos and the breakdown of society.

It’s already been said, but it is always amazing to see one person writing that they are going to boycott a store and then to watch others respond, “But the stores action is legally permissible.” If you think the stores action is optimal, that is a different situation, but no one seems to be saying that.

Ah, Mrs Tilton is correct, ‘rights’ is probably not the right word. I was thinking of Joe’s own thoughts on the matter.

I’ve read a couple of months of Joe’s blog now; and he’s mentioned the evil boss once; he’d didn’t slander the boss, as what he said was clearly (even without the disclaimer) his opinion. Neither of his accounts of being denied a day off (which he asked for over a month in advance), nor his disciplinary hearing have been disputed by Waterstone’s. Firing him for an old blog post without warning is unfair and heavy-handed. (It’s not good management either.)

I should say that I wrote to the manager in Waterstone’s in Edinburgh, copying my email to my local branch and their flagship store in Piccadilly (which is the closest thing to a head office I could find) and received a reply from London within 10 minutes which was polite and said, “Unfortunately we cannot comment on this matter as it is confidential between the company and the employee.” Well, it’s nice to know that complaints get read.

BTW, both Waterstone’s in Cardiff (where I live) have good science fiction sections. They have little on the comics front which they’ve left to Forbidden Planet.

“There’s no restraint of speech here; Gordon is still free to blog anything he likes, isn’t he?”

What part of “he lost his job for a couple of silly blog comments” isn’t clear?

Yes, he was and still is technically free to speak his mind, but he had to pay consequences for that. The point is not wether someone literally suppressed his right to speak, but whether those consequences in this case were right or wrong. Since it is a company initiative and not intervention by a government enforcing (or breaking) its own laws about freedom of speech, obviously it’s the wider non-literal sense of that freedom that’s an issue here. But yeah, like others have said, it’s not even about that primarily, mostly it’s about an example of corporate idiocy and arrogance.

Now we get to the ugly part of Free Speech. First, did the blogger in question sign a pre-employment agreement that explicitly say he could not publically speak out against his employer? Second, what is his former employer’s policy on extra curricular activities? Third, did he reference his employer in his blog? If so, how so? As far as I can tell this is not a black and white matter.

This hardcore libertarian and SF fan is, for the record, with Jacob Levy and djw.

I’d oppose any law making the guy’s firing illegal, but it’s a damned obnoxious thing to do, and if there were any Waterstone’s around where I live to boycott, I’d boycott it. And Jacob is right on about the desirability of making a better culture come about through one’s voluntary actions. Indeed I think a key libertarian point applying to many issues is that, given the ultimate dependence of firms on consumers’ pleasure, such actions *can* be effective in restraining many types of obnoxiousness and promoting a more open and tolerant society.

“Yes, he was and still is technically free to speak his mind, but he had to pay consequences for that.”

He remains literally free to speak his mind and he didn’t have to pay anything. He wasn’t entitled to the job except on whatever terms the company was prepared to offer.

“He wasn’t entitled to the job except on whatever terms the company was prepared to offer” says John T Kennedy.
I’ve been appalled on reading about this case on US blogs. Lots of people take the Kennedy position and it’s a shame. Even soi-disant left-wingers like Steve Gilliard. http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2005/01/blogging-lessons-1-protect-yourself.html

They seem to identify with an incompetent giant corporation, thinking “that giant corporation could be *me* someday”. Sure it could.

Either that, or they’re so ground down in their own jobs that sounding tough about someone else’s travails somehow ameliorates.
Management objecting to workers telling it like it is is not reality-based. The market, being reality-based, will crush their organisation, sooner or later. But since this sort of management is only involved in self-aggrandisement I guess they can bail out, leaving the workers.