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No

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Unless the employee is giving out secret work documents, or any other kind of harm working place; the answer is a simple no. The employees have their own lives and are allowed to do anything they want with it as long as it is legal.

The employer has no right to look into his employees private pages to find a reason to fire them. If they have reason to fire them, they should do it; however, if they have to dig through the deep canyons of the web to find a reason, which is not necessary even connected to the work the employee is doing, to be able to fire him or her. What the employees do on their free time should have no effect on their possibility to remain in the job they are having.

Digging Deep Enough

Each of us has some secrets that they would wish the employer would not get to know of. The web is a harsh place where the information of something you might have done when you were 11 years old exists. There have been many famous people whose past was not what they made it look like and they were not fired because of it.

The employer should only be interested about information or problems that are directly influences the ability to work the way the contract dictates. Everything else should be left out of the working place; not everything belongs to be know by your chef.

Proof

The employer accidentally finds your MySpace , YouTube, or Facebook account and fires you because of what you have written or shown on one of those pages. First of all he has to be able to proof the account belongs to you and not someone else; there are to be something on those pages that would be forbidden by your contract.

If nothing of these exist; the employer should not have the right to fire you just because you have an account on one of these pages. In fact, he seems to be looking into them himself/herself; does he have an account in there too?

Hiring

People get hired for jobs all the time all over the Internet; any of these three pages should not make a difference at all. The location where the employer is hired does not matter; there has to be a reason why someone would bother to go through all the hard work to get someone to work for him/her. In fact the person targeted has the chance to say yes or no to the job offer. Unlike with firing someone they have the choice left to themselves; no one can force you to work in a place you do not want to.

Getting a job offer is always good; there should be no restriction how someone may be recruited to a job. Firing someone based of past events, also the recent ones are past, should only be allowed if a certain event contradicts with the working contract; this should only be possible if the event has happened after the having signed the working contract.

Learn more about this author, Tuomas Tapola.
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