An article in the Register deals with the mingling of business and pleasure at work. I think it raises some interesting issues about where society in general is heading.
It seems totally unaware of this, of course, focusing instead on the apparently intractable problem of unravelling this Gordian knot and isolating private pleasure from its presumed opposite business (ie public pain??). The problem in fact is the business side, and particularly ownership and power over our work.
Remove private ownership and power, and the whole system falls nicely into order, with everyone owning everything and deciding together how to share it and (re)produce it. So let's have an end to the private appropriation of social wealth, to the private ownership of social production, and try social ownership of social production, the social appropriation of social wealth, instead.
First the article, then my comment.
The politics of email in the workplace
Mixing business with pleasure
Published Thursday 19th April 2007 10:13 GMTIt's springtime in Washington, D.C. The cherry blossoms have bloomed, the tourists descended, and on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue a new "scandal" is erupting.
In the Watergate era, there was the controversy about Rosemary Woods and the 18 ½ minute "gap" - a missing portion of a taped conversation of June 20, 1972. Now in connection with "US Attorney-gate" we have a new controversy. The alleged "destruction" of electronic mail sent by employees of the White House through email servers used by the Republican National Committee. The matter raises more important issues for government agencies, companies, ISPs and others. Do I really have an email retention policy, and what emails do these policies apply to?
The US attorney controversy
The immediate issue arises out of an investigation by Democrats on the United States Senate Judiciary Committee into allegations that certain federal prosecutors were fired for improper political purposes. The US Department of Justice asserts that the firings were for perfectly appropriate "performance" reasons and that these prosecutors serve at the pleasure of the President and can be fired for virtually any reason.
The email controversy arose when it was discovered that White House employees may have sent email communications about the US Attorney matter through US government computers or computer systems using email systems operated by the Republican National Committee (RNC.) Unlike most governmental emails, which as I will show have to be retained, there is generally no legal requirement that emails of the RNC be maintained. Thus, at least according to press reports, the emails in the RNC systems were "deleted" after 30 days. Or were they?Personal vs non-personal email
The issues surrounding the controversy are not limited to the United States government. Every company that maintains a mail system has the problem of what to retain, and how to retain it. In addition to a "corporate" email system, companies may also provide employees with access to personal email. This may be through a separate exchange server, but more frequently, companies may allow employees to access their personal email through some form of webmail, either by POP3 or IMAP protocols. Most email systems allow access to email over the web, including AOL, Google's GMail, MSN, and its Hotmail service, Comcast, etc. While many companies expressly prohibit and indeed block access to personal email through their servers, there are actually legal reasons to permit such access.
Corporate or government email, coming as it does from "whitehouse.gov" or "company.com" carries with it an imprimatur of authority. It can be likened to a corporate letterhead or official government stationary. Yet people use such email for much more casual conversations then they would for a formal corporate letter. Nobody would consider whipping out company stationary to write a letter to their doctor or send a quick note to the girl scout troop leader. But an email - no problem. As a result, corporations and government agencies end up sending "official" email about all kinds of matters which do not relate in any way to official business. Indeed, it becomes difficult for recipients of email to effectively determine which communications are intended to bind the company, and which ones aren't - what the law calls "apparent authority".
Companies can deal with this problem in several ways. First, they can impose an outright ban on any kind of personal use of email. A quick note to the little league coach that Bobby is going to be late because mom has to work late is a policy violation which may result in disciplinary action.
Would such a policy be effective, workable, and enforceable? In most cases, probably not - at least not without a good deal of technology deployed around it, including "white lists" and content filters. One problem with this approach is that it is generally implemented inconsistently, and this can lead to legal problems. For example, a recent case involved a Virginia newspaper that prohibited personal use of its email system, but apparently only enforced this policy when employees used the email system for union organising activity lead to legal problems for the paper.
In that case (pdf), decided March 15, 2007, the court found that the uneven enforcement of the "no personal use" policy meant that the company could not select union activities for enforcement. The lesson is: if you are going to prohibit personal use of email, you'd better prohibit it entirely.
(and so on...)
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Choppa's comment:
Although the piece appears to encourage clearer demarcation between public and private affairs, in fact it points to where human society is heading. The arguments for separation are all based on the society we live in now - rotting capitalism, swollen to bursting with greed and gore, but grotesquely bound here and there with useless but painful red tape. But the behaviour of the actual human beings living their lives as best they can in this inhuman environment is heading the opposite way altogether. Work as part of life, and life as part of work.
In terms of who produces the stuff we use, everything belongs to everyone, as so many parts of society are involved in the production of both the tiniest everyday objects and the hugest international infrastructure projects. We could call this the forces of production. In terms of who owns the stuff we use, well, nothing belongs to everyone and everything belongs to the billionaires. Lets call this the relations of production.
Guess what? The forces of production and the relations of production are in contradiction. Tearing each other to pieces in real but invisible conflicts all around us.
Judge for yourself whether the forces or the relations of production are more human. Judge their relative strengths, now and historically over the centuries. Which will prevail??
Hmmm...
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