I got forwarded an article in the Washington Post by a friend...

An Atlanta blogger who goes by Karsh says he was fired from a sales position in January after he blogged on company time. He was not so contrite. The writer of BGB, or Black Gay Blogger, said his boss wanted him to apologize for the things he had said about his fellow employees.

Since the other workers were not named, he did not think it was necessary, he said. “I feel like it's been said and done.”

The blogger renamed his supervisor “Skeletor” and “Wednesday Addams” in an entry about the confrontation. When the was told he would be demoted and had to dismantle his site, he quit, he said.

I always am a little concerned about how open I want to be when writing but, then I think it’s one of those things that people have to seek out. In the cases cited in the article, one instance shows a lapse of judgment on the part of the blogger in terms of confidentiality agreements - you know, those things you sometimes sign when starting a new gig, the documents you skim over and for the most part ignore.

Most of the others though are just people griping or offering up their opinions about the workplace, their working conditions, their co-workers and their jobs. When you get right down to it, it’s people blowing off some steam. I would imagine someone blogging about their job and getting whatever pent up angst they have about their gig is infinitely preferable to someone coming in and going postal. How oppressive is our society becoming?

None of the instances one will notice involve people speaking glowingly about their job though. Ah, there’s the rub I guess, positive publicity is okay but negative observations have no place in the corporate environment of today - seems to me that that’s one of the things wrong with ‘Corporate America.’

Corporations and business in our country can do no wrong it seems - it‘s the American way. It’s stretched to every aspect of our lives - from a personal level to the biggest organizational levels including our government. Our society is comprised of godlike, perfect beings and organizations which can do no wrong, or rather if they do, they surely cannot own up to it.

So, getting back to the article, I got the link from a friend and at the end of the day I figure if your going to get fired for what you write on a blog, they pretty much were going to find something to fire you over anyway. Just the act of firing someone over negative comments in a blog is validation on some level of what the person wrote.