Welcome to the Employment Law Blog
By Gail Escolme, 07 May 2010 –
Welcome to the Employment Law Blog on our brand new website. I am Gail Escolme and I specialise in employment law. I will be blogging on a regular basis regarding current employment law issues, points of note and just general observation regarding how people deal with employment law problems on a daily basis. I encourage anyone who has a specific issue to contact me to discuss it further. Please also post any comments you may have arising from my blogs.
Given that this is our new website the topic I want to begin with is social networking sites (SNS's), i.e. Facebook, Bebo, etc. It is now a fact of life that most employees, and not just the young things out there, are accessing SNS's whilst at work. There are also recent statistics to show that 4 out of 5 employers do NOT have a policy setting out the rules in respect of accessing these sites. Employers should decide whether there workers are allowed to access SNS's at all on office equipment, outside office hours, i.e. before or after work, at lunchtime, and what the sanctions would be for posting comments on the site that are offensive, derogatory, etc, particularly if they brought the business into disrepute. It doesn't take long to put such a policy together and it would help both employers and employees know what the rules are.