Reply #14: why should they not have the right to publicly slam their employer...? [View All]

[mike_c]

Unless they signed a contract that says otherwise, their employer pays them a salary in exchange for their labor, in essence buying their time. Setting aside-- for a moment-- the issue of what that entails during the hours the employer is paying for, if the employer only buys eight hours a day or forty hours a week, what right to they have do regulate the employee's conduct during the time they are not compensating the employee at all? One might make a decent argument that the employer has a right to regulate conduct by default if it affects the employee's ability to perform during work hours, but otherwise not.

Now for the other question-- does an employer have a fundamental right to regulate an employee's human rights at any time? I don't know the legal issues involved, so I'll defer to a labor lawyer if any want to chime in, but it seems to me that even during working hours fundamental constitutional rights must be upheld. In the present instance, an employee might post a derogatory comment during their off hours-- clearly exercising their constitutional right to free speech-- but a reader might access that comment on a public web site during the employees work shift. Therefore, it seems that if the employee must forfeit their constitutional rights when they are being compensated, those rights are also impinged upon during their personal time.

Either way you look at it, it's an uncompensated intrusion of the company into the employee's private life. If an employee is to be expected to provide something to the employer at any time-- including control of their constitutional freedoms-- then that sacrifice should be compensated.