SEPARATION BETWEEN WORK AND PERSON

Opinion  /  Denis Rancourt


The rule regarding employer information-mining of social media should be strict. None of it should be allowed.

Tenure or no tenure, full-time or part-time, boss or shop-floor... no one in any employment should ever lose his/her job for any views expressed as a person (as opposed to spokesperson).

The employer should have an onus to satisfy a high threshold that the employee failed in his/her work duties and has refused or was unable to correct the deficiency, without the employer being allowed any reliance on ideological or character inference from social-media communications. Period.

Otherwise, we live in a totalitarian state that can remove livelihood on the basis of political or personal thoughts and expressed views.

This is not complicated. There are no subtleties.

Corporate, government and private-company employers do not own the employees. Rather, they rent some services for specific tasks, whether physical or ideological tasks, and they are allowed to do so pursuant to government-enacted statutes. These statutes give the non-natural-person employer: legal rights, entity privileges, and responsibilities towards society. Their employees must be entitled to protection against use of personality-related information.