ian said:

Futile. As you said before ... you don't understand the legalities of this.

First of all, if the company has a set of reasonable rules to which you have signed up, then you are likely to be bound by them contractually. Signing up to them might mean that, when you put your name on the employment contract, you agree to abide by the rules set out in the Company Rule Book Volumes 1-26 over in the corner, on the official intranet or wherever. Your suggestion that the company should have warned the employee upon discovering the email might sound reasonable, but some employers enforce such rules strictly for good reasons (dependent upon such things as the nature of their business, and even past losses incurred arising from such emails).

A company's system of communication (telephone, email, fax etc.) is generally provided, at least primarily for use by the employees to conduct company business ... not to exchange private messages, which include potentially offensive material. Sometimes companies explicitly or implicitly permit the system for other uses, but when people use a business communication system for private messages which include offensive remarks about other employees, then employees are running a risk.

Companies have every right to monitor how their communication systems are being used. They weren't spying on a private mail ... they were inspecting the standard of work being undertaken under the terms of the contract for which they pay people. It just so happened that the content of the communication had nothing to do with the work that the employee had been tasked to undertake, and it apparently breached the employee's terms of employment.

Suggesting that this person could make a reasonable case for unfair dismissal is likely to be worthless anyway - they have already stated that they are only in temporary employment, so any (unlikely) compensation awarded is likely to be negligible. A better suggestion would be to recognise what the employee did was (like it or not) a breach of contract, get over it and don't make the same mistake again if you want to give yourself a better chance of future employment.

Amen, langebleu, very well stated! Where I used to work, the bosses and upper management made it very clear to us that any emails being sent/received by or to any employee should not be considered private, since they could be read at any time.

Also, any and all time spent on the internet was recorded. It is not uncommon for companies to do this nowadays, and not uncommon for employers to fire their employees if offensive email is sent to another employee, or if the employee spends too much time on the internet. The company views such activity as wasting valuable company time that could be spent doing what the employee was hired to do.

As far as your getting terminated because of the email that you sent to your coworker, that is not uncommon either. There was a lady I used to work with who foolishly posted pictures of her breasts on the public drive of the company's computer, where anybody could find them. Sure enough, the pictures were eventually found, and the lady was fired. Moral of the story is, be very careful of what you send/receive via email at work. Chances are your employer is watching you, even if you think they aren't. Not to sound preachy, but that's just the way it is.

Your a temp?!?

Learn from this and go back to the temp agency and find another job. It's not like you were there 20 years.

I'm missing something here

gainsbourg said:

The company should have notified you in advance that they would be monitoring emails.

But they also have a right to keep track of what their employees are doing on company time.

I'm curious, is the work enironment there such that if you would have called this girl a slapper verbally you would have been fired as well?

I got fired from my first real job. I used to write 'love' on my face like the girl in that one Prince thing that was on vh1 (sheddup, I was 16), and my employer didn't like it (gasp). So my boss hauled me in and told me to wash it off. I told him it was a religious symbol, and that if I couldn't wear it, the Christians at work shouldn't be allowed to wear their crosses. He wasn't impressed. They fired me shortly thereafter.

God, I was a little pain in the ass. Ask me sometime what I put my high school principal through. . . Let me just say that the media got involved, and I left high school (for college) after my sophomore year with his wholehearted blessing and my promise not to tell my classmates that he let me go.

gainsbourg said:

Shit man. That is tragic. I feel so bad about that. I take it that you didn't really mean what U said. It's so weak. If U have to go anyway e-mail your boss and call him a spunk sucking cunt.