A client called to me recently and as she was leaving the office, I asked her if she had taken a day’s holiday leave from work in order to see me and she said that she didn’t as she had taken a sick day. I said I didn’t realise she was unwell and she said she wasn’t but that she was entitled to take 10 sick days a year without explanation and she still had 4 or 5 days left.
This put me in mind of a couple of recent New Zealand employment cases where the employers were seeking court orders to compel employees to handover details from their Facebook pages because there was a suspicion that they had taken sick leave in order to facilitate some social activity and that they were not genuinely sick.
This has created concerns in relation to privacy and one argument was that they wouldn’t be allowed to search the employee’s homes on demand and therefore they should not be allowed to ransack their online lives “looking for dirt” against them.
So many people seem to think that a Facebook entry is a private correspondence between them and their friends. In many cases, the entries on Facebook are open to the world and they are public knowledge. The basic rule is that if you take sick leave and you are not sick, you are in breach of your contract of employment and you could be sacked.
Kevin Brophy
In the UK there have been a number of dismissals due to information employees posted about themselves and/or about the company they were working for at the time.
ReplyDeleteIt does come as a surprise to some people that if they allow the general public to view what they post on line, that it may well come back and bite them.