A Stitch in Haste

I started blawging a little too late to follow the tale of former law student Jeremy Blachman, who created a blawg called “Anonymous Lawyer” around a fictional persona at a large law firm.

Blachman has an op-ed in today’s New York Times, arguing for a right not to be fired for blogging:

Weblogs are worth protecting. It used to be that if you wanted to know what it was like to work for a law firm or a beauty magazine, you had to have a friend on the inside.
…
If no one was reading, employers wouldn’t be concerned. There’s a demand for the first-person narratives people are writing about their jobs. There’s nowhere else to go to create honest conversation about the working world.

So maybe it does make sense that the law should provide special protection for bloggers, because of the social benefits Weblogs provide. The simplest place to start would be to put the burden on employers to show actual harm, if they are firing someone because of her Weblog.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

I don’t even support journalist shield laws, so of course I don’t support a “blogger’s privilege” and certainly can’t see the logic of a “right-to-blog law” in employment.

People who bemoan “at-will” employment tend to forget that it’s their “will” too, not just the employers. The right to fire is offset by the right to quit. The words “fire” or “fired” appear eight times in Blachman’s commentary, but the word “quit” does not appear once.

Neither does the word “contract,” either as noun or verb. The verb usage is more interesting here — if blogging is so important to you as a potential employee, then why not contract, openly and expressly, with the employer to include a “no firing for blogging” clause? Blachman asserts, correctly, that “blogs are worth protecting.” Fine, then protect them — by negotiating for them in your employment agreement.

All at-will employees already have a “right to blog.” It’s included in the right to quit. Blachman is describing a solution in search of a problem.

Similar Posts:

• The Fallacy of “Blogger Rights”
• On Forcing People Not to “Force People”
• San Francisco’s War on Employment
• Big Ashtray is Watching You — So What?
• “Less Employment, Great Taste…”

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