TRIMET IS INTRUDING ON MY RIGHTS OFF THE JOB!

 Then there is a practical concern: Terminating bloggers may result in more damage than retaining them in your control. Bloggers have a lot of passion. Do you really want to give them free time, too? If you are worried about an employee's blogging, imagine what he might say when he has lots of time and anger and nothing to lose!
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Like the laws enacted in a number of states prohibiting employers from regulating certain off-duty activities, the NLRB’s complaint signals that all employers – even those without a unionized workforce – must think carefully when implementing policies that affect employees’ off-duty activities
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"Attempts to regulate personal relationships and off-duty conduct of employees may subject employers to legal exposure. Disciplinary action in response to off-duty behavior that has no direct relationship to the workplace should be avoided or kept to a minimum. To protect themselves in this area, employers must: 



If an employee is disseminating trade secrets, defamatory comments or is “blogging” on company time or computers, then an employer can probably safely terminate the employee. An employer may also be able to terminate an at-will employee who is bad-mouthing, ridiculing or generally denigrating the company, a boss or, worst of all, the employer’s product. However, the operative word is “may.” Taking adverse action against even at-will employees for blogging on their own time, especially when those blogs are not defamatory or do not implicate trade secrets, may raise issues involving discrimination, retaliation, and political and free speech. In many cases, your reaction to a blog entry could end up costing you much more than the original blog post ever would have. Aside from these issues, monitoring employee’s blogs also gets into the thorny area of controlling what the employee does on his or her own time.




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AND LOTS LOTS MORE LEGAL REFERENCE ON THIS TOPIC!