Internet-related Labor (and productivity) Issues

The Intenet has been shown to have greatly improved productivity in the workplace. However, there are innumerable cases when unrestricted and unmonitored use of the net is a primary cause of inefficiency and even disputes in the workplace.

Case in point is a labor dispute in New Zealand, which involved a woman who was held to have been unjustifiably dismissed by her employer after she forwarded an email she received from her father, which contained naked pictures. This woman allegedly forwarded the email during work hours despite two previous warnings from the employer. (details in this article). The New Zealand Employment Relations Authority (their version of our NLRC) ruled in favor of this woman employee, ordering her company to pay her $9000 as damages for her unjustifiable dismissal.

We do not need to travel beyond the nation's shores for examples of employees who send personal emails and surf and download as they please during work hours, using company hardware, network, utilities and other resources. These are employees who would go to friendster sites, download music/videos or forward jokes and other similar emails during company meetings or instead of finishing a business review or a similar deliverable. Some of these downloads are even gateways of viruses which infect the company's network and immensely slow down productivity.

I myself, was and still am guilty of doing such things. While I believe dismissal is a rather harsh penalty for an employee who surfs and emails during work hours, using company computers, there ought to be a limit as to such personal use of the company's internet resources. (I guess that's why some companies' network administration policies restrict the sites that employees could visit and even monitor the emails that employees send - arguably an invasion of privacy, as viewed from the employee's eyes). For me, an employee's use of his company's net resources for personal purposes is of no moment for as long as it is not unreasonably excessive (e.g. he does nothing but surf & send personal emails for an entire day or half of it) and for as long as he is able to deliver quality output expected of him on time.