The Merits Of Employers Monitoring Our Social Media

Replace the words "social media" with "telephone." Are you now feeling charitable towards employers listening to employees' phone calls, just in case they should unintentionally injure the company? Replace "telephone" with "published writing." Are you in favor of employers monitoring the off-job publications of their employees in the same way? I think this draft is really an exercise in not thinking. It uses technological pseudo-complexity to conceal from itself the question it is skirting: how much power should employers have to retaliate against or control the off-job speech of their employees? In the US, where the savage system of employment at will is the norm, and the best method for controlling abuse of power by employers at will, collective bargaining, has become almost obsolete, the very idea that it might be absolutely none of the employer's business, in the most literal sense, what the employee does with her constitutionally-protected freedom of speech off the job seems almost quaint, which is why you think you don't have to ask it. Asking the question doesn't mean answering it simply or in one way. Naturally the contractual restriction of off-job speech will be important to employers, oddly enough most important in speech-related businesses. But once we are discussing contractual bargaining the employer will pay for what it wants, often not only with money but with security against dismissal. Restrictions on "social media" activity by unionized teachers, for example, may well be important to school districts, and there's no doubt of the legality of such provisions in their contracts. But they are bargained for, and the people so restricted are also protected by tenure in the unrestricted portions of their public speech.

So in the end, I really think you're expressing opinions about unions, and about employer power, that you may not know you have and don't know you're expressing. Such opinions are called "ideology," and they exist so that power can determine your thinking for you. The best way to improve this essay is to de-ideologize it, by figuring out from the ground up (that is, from power up, because power is always the ground) what you think, making sure that you are not smuggling the received wisdom's assumptions into your bag at your own expense.