Cyberslacking

Workers are grumbling at the new electronic oversight, but management is well within its rights, according to legal experts. "It may be unfair for a boss to fire you for a five-minute Web-site visit, but it's not illegal," says Lewis Maltby, workplace-rights chief for the American Civil Liberties Union. "If you filed a lawsuit, you wouldn't have a prayer." While some privacy experts challenge bosses' rights to pry into personal e-mail, courts have not ruled against it. The argument goes that since the computer belongs to the company, the brass have a right to view everything in it. And unlike personal phone calls, e-mails to friends leave a permanent record. Delete does not mean delete, says John Jessen, chief executive of Electronic Evidence Discovery in Seattle. He regularly retrieves incriminating e-mail for corporate clients. "The stuff employees leave on their computers helps companies get them 90 percent of the time."

Just ask Glen Eastman, who was fired from Compaq last year after nearly 19 years on the job. The engineer's bosses first called him on the carpet for personal use of the telephone. But he says they didn't fire him until they found three e-mails he had sent from his office at Compaq for an airplane-repair business he was starting. Other companies, including United Parcel Service, have also fired workers for running their own businesses from work. Indeed, Eastman says others in his office sold Amway products from their desktops, but none were fired. He suspects he was targeted because he's over 50 and earned $70,000 a year. But after taking his grievance to a lawyer, Eastman discovered the "everybody else is doing it" defense doesn't wash. "It's a real revelation to learn you have no rights in the workplace," says the father of three, who had to sell his home and use his life savings to pay bills. "Your whole world tumbles apart." A Compaq official says Eastman was "misusing company resources for financial gain," which created "a disruption in the workplace" and was "a clear conflict of interest."

As cyberslacking becomes an ingrained part of American corporate culture, bosses live in fear of a meltdown like the one Lockheed Martin suffered last year. The defense contractor's e-mail system crashed for six hours after an employee sent 60,000 co-workers an e-mail (with e-receipt requested) about a national prayer day. For a company that posts 40 million e-mails a month, the crash cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. A Microsoft rescue squad had to be flown in to painstakingly dismantle the computer code gridlock the employee's e-mail had created. The Microsoft engineers also overhauled Lockheed Martin's e-mail security so no single employee could ever send an electronic time bomb again. The employee, whom the company won't identify, was fired for "an act of sabotage." How did Lockheed Martin cope throughout the crisis? "We had to resort to using the telephone," says spokeswoman Elaine Hinsdale.

Like most companies, Lockheed Martin knows it can't stop the cyberslacking altogether. Even the company's spokeswoman admits to buying gifts on the L.L. Bean site. "It's become quite handy for those of us who work a lot of hours," says Hinsdale. No doubt bosses everywhere plan to write memos condemning cyberslacking, just as soon as they sign off from E*Trade.