The Regional High Court has sided with an employer who sacked three workers for viewing social networks on company computers.

Likewise they back the use of spying programs on office computers to control their use by employees.

“If they ever find out that I’m here on facebook, they’ll fire me, ha ha ha!” This is what one of the said employees wrote and she was right; they did find out and they did fire her. But she decided to take her employer to court for unfair dismissal.

The local court declared it as unfair dismissal, but the company appealed before the Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Andalucia, who took a different view.

The workplace is a well known hotel in Granada. The three employees used the hotel computer for online chats and other Internet leisure activities, despite the hotel’s prohibition against doing so, therefore, it was not as if they were unaware that they were ‘doing wrong.’ Many would argue that they didn’t need to be told, to realise that if you are being paid to work, you should be doing precisely that; working.

The hotel suspected that workers were using company telecommunications for private use and gave written notice, requiring each member of staff to sign it, expressly forbidding using the hotel’s computers and mobile phones for such use. They took the further step to install a program to track misuse of the computers’ Internet connections.

The dismissed workers can take their case to the highest court in the land, of course, but to date it is not known whether they will do so.

(News: Metropolitan Area, Granada, Andalucia)