Woman’s online shopping at work not sackable offence, judge rules

6 comments

1. I would worry more about the people watching porn at work

2. Nice to see a story where employers try to screw an employee over get done in themselves. 

3. That’s a misleading headline if i’ve ever seen one. For anyone who doesn’t want to click through: the employer changed the company name and then tried to fire her with “less than 2 years service” when she actually had at least 4 years. Their justification was browsing personal sites during work hours on her work PC (less than 2 hours in 2 days) but there is a note that a lot of that time was excel training and so was relevant to the job. 

   It had never been told to her that she could not browse Amazon using her work PC during breaks, and her boss did it to, so it couldn’t have been a proper policy.

   She was fired because her boss wanted to give the job to their sister. It’s simple as that, definitely unfair dismissal.

   The takeaway is not “browse Amazon to your heart’s content at work and they can’t fire you”. It’s “lacking specific policy on the topic, some use of work machines for personal browsing is not a sackable offence, and this case was particularly flimsy”.

4. It’s a bit of a misleading headline. The article implies that the ruling in her favour was because her dismissal was transparently to enable the owners sister to take her role and online shopping was the excuse they used.

5. Read some of this yesterday. Stop reading because it was yet another misleading headline from the BBC.

6. “Headline tells a tiny part of the story to generate rage” klaxon.

Comments are closed.