DC employees beware

It is assumed that computers owned by DC and installed on their premises will be used for company business only.. IBM take the same stand point.. many others too.. employees know the risks.. like getting caught speeding by radar.. not so much 'poor' as careless..

-- History is only the past if we choose to do nothing about it..

Yes, this is true now of most large companies. My employer has the same policy and tells you that your email may be monitored as well. Posting from work is simply stupid.

Matt

If posting from work, it's not "poor folks" it's poor thieves!

I don't understand why people don't think improper internet access cost anything.

KS

Well, too many companies don't tell their employees that their internet and phones are watched or that they are under surveilance cameras at all times. This amounts to deception. While people should not waste time on the internet during working hours, I'm concerned about tracking of home computer use. Privacy should be a concern of everybody. You can go to MIB.COM, the medical information bureau and get a complete history of every claim for medical care you've ever submitted to insurance. This record is the basis for making some people unemployable. Your application that asks if you have health concerns authorizes a potential employer to get this information before hiring you. For a small fee it's easy to get a total background investigation on friends, enemies or co-workers.

Not really. Unfortunately there really needs to be some federal laws or perhaps federal court cases (which will happen if the legislators chicken out) that define what rights an employee of an organization has when on the employers clock. If these guidelines say that an employer has the right to observe via covert surveillance then the employee must assume that they are being observed all the time while at work, and there's no requirement for the employer to confirm or deny this. Right now there's no baseline so charges of "deception" would really only apply if the employer stated that they DIDN'T use surveillance when in actuality they did.

This is really too simple a statement. For example take myself, I'm salaried and make the same money whether working 40 actual clock hours or not. Furthermore I am responsible for many different systems all of which must be online

24x7. Thus if one of these takes a shit at 3:00am in the morning I'm the one that has to put it back together, right then, not 6 hours later at 9:00am. So, the question becomes what are my working hours? From one point of view they are 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. From another they are only my actual hours that I am touching company-owned equipment, and since I determine what those hours are in many cases, how exactly do I go about "wasting time during working hours" when I am the one that says when I'm working and when I'm not?

Frankly I see little harm in allowing employees to use their desktop systems for recreational use of the Internet during lunch and break time. An organization should already have deployed adequate anti-virus and firewalling software so as to protect their network from an employee casually web surfing. And the truth of the matter is that for most employees, it's only the sites like ebay and shopping.com that become problems, and the network admin can easily lock these sites out during certain times of the day with any decent firewall.

It is true this happens to some people but on the other side of the coin there are people who have chronic problems who refuse to acknowledge them. For example someone who has a long history of back problems who applies for a job where he is regularly expected to lift 50 pound items, figuring that his back problems are not going to reoccur. (or denying even to himself that he has a bad back) Is it fair to allow these people the shield of medical confidentiality so they can go thorough employer after employer, making claim after claim?

Keep in mind that an employer isn't going to spend the money on the fee unless they have decided they want to make an offer to the job candidate. If the candidate has been upfront and honest with the employer during the interview process then the medical check will not hold any surprises. And as for things the candidate would just as soon prefer to be kept quiet (such as a history of drug abuse) well the fact is that if the candidate is a former drug abuser, they cannot simply erase that from their past. The candidate is really best off simply asking the interviewer if a medical check is going to be done, and if the employer indicates that it will be, then the candidate should simply bring up a short summary of the history and explain that the problem has been corrected. Doing this gives the candidate control over how the employer learns about the problem, rather than being a victim.

Ted

actually your talking about those guys in Brampton who took pictures in the factory of cars which weren't out for the public yet, they posted the pics on various web forums for all to see, before dc got a chance to reveal the vehicles. It is a company NO-NO, and these employee's knew it, also notice how their union doesn't have much to say, they broke dc's rules.

Punch

My understanding is that that part of your post is not compltetely accurate. I'm not defending either side (thought I think that you are correct in that technically the rules were broken), but the information, including similar pictures, was already all over the internet. The violation was that it had not been officially released for publication by DC, even though the essentially same info. was already out there from other sources.

Bill Putney (to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with "x")

Hello, How do you know "union" employees posted the pics? There are a few management people who have those skills also - but few do :-) Anyway, what does the union have to do with this is the first place?

Dan

Unions have the nack of getting criminals their jobs back!

And when exactly did you formed that opinion - 1970. Unions have a knack of helping good employees get there jobs back.