Web surfing isn’t a firable offense? When, exactly, did we become France?

I realize this ruling pertains to a city government, which is slightly different from a private business, but goofing off on the job seems like a textbook example of a valid reason to fire someone, if you’ve given them warnings.

That might seem hypocritical of me. I get my work done, but there are occasions that I check out the news online. However, I understand that my employer has every right to fire me for that if they wish. Heck, if they want to fire me because they don’t like my new glasses, they could do that, too — that’s the whole point to at-will employment, isn’t it?

Another weird aspect to this whole thing is that he wasn’t, as near as I can tell, fired for actual internet use, though he’d been warned about that by supervisors in the past.

The ruling came after Mayor Michael Bloomberg fired a worker in the city’s legislative office in Albany earlier this year after he saw the man playing a game of solitaire on his computer.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he went to some website to play solitaire because the city removed solitaire from all of their PCs, but it seems much more likely that he was playing solitaire without any use of the internet at all.

I have to ask… if Mayor Bloomberg had walked in, and the guy had been playing solitaire with real cards on his desk and gotten himself fired for that, would he still be fighting this? Would he have a shot at winning? Would it be news?