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Mon, 10 Jan 2005
I've been quiet recently because I've just finished a novel and, being somewhat tired, have been resting up. I've also been a bit too angry to write my next blog entry, and consequently decided to give myself a few days to cool off and think about it before firing up the text editor.
Our story starts either eleven years ago, or last Wednesday, depending which end you want to hear it from. Eleven years ago, a young and enthusiastic fellow called Joe applied for (and got) a job with Waterstones, a major bookshop chain, at one of their main stores in Edinburgh. Last Wednesday Joe was sacked for alleged gross misconduct and bringing the company into disrepute. His offense, it appears, was to have a weblog, maintained in his own time and at his own expense, from home.
From the disclaimer on, it's clearly a let-your-hair-down, blow-off-steam affair. "The Woolamaloo Gazette is a satirical newspaper I first started on email way back in 1992. It allows me to vent steam on stories which are bugging me or amusing me and hopefully make people think at the same time. Satire is the best defence in any democracy. Items in the old Woolamaloo Gazette style newpaper articles will be obvious from the bold-face banner headline. Anything else is just my ramblings, mumblings or rants." And ramble, mumble, and generally rant is a fair description of what Joe did -- advisedly or inadvisedly -- for about twelve to thirteen years, without any trouble until now.
It seems that when push came to shove, this wasn't enough of a disclaimer to protect Joe from being fired for gross misconduct and bringing the company into disrepute. Rambling, mumbling, or ranting outside the workplace is now, it would appear, a sacking offense.
A couple of circumstances are worth bearing in mind.
For starters, Joe is an extremely knowledgable specialist bookseller. He's an SF fan. Not just an SF fan, but a reasonably personable bookselling SF fan with an encyclopaedic grasp of the field and an enthusiasm for it that was infectious -- it was difficult to walk into that shop and walk out again without having spent far too much money. His buying recommendations spread throughout the company (and outside it, as a regular reviewer writing for the online SF lit crit field), to an extent such that one editor of my acquaintance knew him by name as one of the key people to target if you wanted a new SF book launch in the UK to go down well. People trusted his opinions, people inside his company. The combination of specialist knowledge with enthusiasm isn't something you can buy: if you're running a business you just have to hope you can grab it when you see it. For a fellow occupying a relatively humble niche -- no manager, he -- Joe was disproportionately influential.
For seconds ... over the past few years Waterstones has plotted a precarious path through the turbulent waters of corporate retail. Most recently, the company was taken over by HMV, another large retail media chain. About six to eight months ago a new manager arrived at Joe's branch, and reading between the lines it appears that there was an immediate negative reaction: perhaps calling it a clash of corporate cultures wouldn't be excessive. Joe was banished from the front desk to the stock room, a grubby windowless basement from which he had no exposure to customers. The previously thriving program of author readings and signings mysteriously vanished. Shelf space devoted to SF and fantasy -- Joe's speciality -- receded into the shadowy depths of the store and shortened, shedding titles and variety (which, for a genre where sales are largely midlist driven and readers are browsers, is the kiss of death). And finally, Joe was accused of gross misconduct by his manager on the basis of a trawl through his online journal.
Bluntly: it appears that someone in the company's management (I suspect the store manager) decided that the face didn't fit. In so doing, they set up a kangaroo court using any evidence they could find -- and Joe's weblog came to hand. As with most journals where the author thinks they have a sympathetic audience, an unsympathetic audience can find copious quantities of ammunition. Waterstones has no company policy on employee weblogs. One would think that a bookshop might not want to discourage employees from writing (in their own time), but one would be wrong when a case for dismissal is being whipped up out of nothing in particular. Joe offered repeatedly to rectify any specifics which might have unintentionally caused offense, and was ignored. It seems that the maximum disciplinary response was required for grumbles written two years earlier: just as it would be for an airline pilot found stinking drunk at the controls, or an employee found stealing from the company.
How to explain the unwisdom of this decision ...?
Firstly, Waterstones have just lost one of their two most knowledgable employees in a field that generates a reasonable amount of their revenue. So purely from a business point of view, this was a dumb decision.
Secondly, they're booksellers: booksellers should not be in the censorship business. It makes them look stupid, and obsessively self-important, and a little bit malignant on the side.
Thirdly, I am led to believe that proceedings before an industrial tribunal are likely to commence once the official letter of dismissal arrives. If Waterstones win such proceedings, they'll have effectively established that employers can exercise prior restraint on anything their employees care to publish outside of their job. I don't suppose I need to explain why I think this would be a Bad Thing. On the other hand, if Waterstones lose, they'll have established that some of their management is willing enough to contrive baseless allegations in order to sack employees. (I have difficulty imagining a more efficient impediment to recruiting quality staff in future ...)
This is a lose/lose situation for Waterstones, and I sincerely hope that somebody at head office is awake enough to realize that they don't need the self-generated adverse publicity. I would suggest an equitable solution would involve reinstating Joe to an equivalent post at one of their other branches (to minimize friction), and adding a policy on staff weblogs to their terms of employment so that similar incidents can't happen in future.
More urgently, I'd point to this as a warning for anyone who isn't self-employed and who writes a weblog: watch out. Indeed, it's a warning to anyone who isn't self-employed and who wants to write in their own time. Corporate reach is threatening to deprive you of the right to self-expression. Censorship is no prettier when it's exercised by corporate fiat instead of government bureaucrat: I don't want to paint Joe as some kind of martyr to a civil rights campaign, but that is exactly what Waterstones have unwittingly made of him by their disproportionate response.
posted at: 16:45 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entryspecials:
Is SF About to Go Blind? -- Popular Science article by Greg Mone
Unwirer -- an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction
Inside the MIT Media Lab -- what it's like to spend a a day wandering around the Media Lab
"Nothing like this will be built again" -- inside a nuclear reactor complex
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