Associated Press

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• Facebook, what have you done?

Don’t bash your boss on Facebook – particularly one you “friended” on the social networking site.

Some workers have come to this conclusion a little too late, after losing their jobs for criticising their employers and workplaces.

A survey of 1 000 Americans found that 56 percent thought it was irresponsible to be online friends with a boss and 62 percent said it was wrong to be friends with an employee. About 76 percent of respondents to the survey, released last year, believed it was acceptable to be friends with a workplace peer.

This issue has been slow to affect South Africans, with no reported case law from the Labour Court or Labour Appeal Court dealing with the issue of social media in the workplace.

A local disgruntled employee called to a disciplinary hearing after comparing the workplace to a “kindergarten” has asked for legal advice on an online forum.

One Cape Town-based case has recently hit the headlines with the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration deciding that an employer was correct in dismissing two senior employees for Facebook conversations about their workplace.

The commissioner in the case, Sedick and another vs Krisray, noted that the internet was public domain. “This also applies to Facebook, to the extent that the employees had not restricted access to the relevant pages. As a consequence of their failure to make use of the privacy options, they had abandoned their right to privacy,” said Jan Truter of LabourWise.

The two employees’ comments included “what an idiot” and “today was hectic with Frankenstein”. “While some of the postings were quite innocuous and not, in the commissioner’s opinion, all that damaging to the employment relationship, the greater number were extremely serious and, if not constituting insubordination, certainly constituted gross insolence,” Truter said.

The commissioner found that the dismissal was a fair sanction after taking into account what had been written, where the comments had been posted and to whom they had been directed. Truter said the arbitration award was concluded with the terse observation from the commissioner: “If employees wish their opinions to remain private, they should refrain from posting them on the internet.”

Law experts have recommended that employees who used Facebook or Twitter should not say anything on these platforms that they wouldn’t say in an office meeting. - Cape Times

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