Monday, 26 January 1998

By BILL DEDMAN
c.1998 N.Y. Times News Service

CHICAGO - When Cameron Barrett taught his co-workers to surf the World Wide Web, he never imagined what they would do with their new skills.

At a small advertising agency in rural Traverse City, Mich., Barrett, 24, was hired to teach some 40-something female employees how to view and produce Web pages for clients.

In a class, he mentioned that he wrote fiction. So several employees visited his Internet home page (http://www.camworld.com), where they found short stories about sex, humor, violence and estrangement: An unnamed narrator describes killing everyone in a stark white room; a snowman accidentally knocks his wife's head off during lovemaking. (``In the morning, the sun came out and that was the last he ever saw of his wife or children again.'')

After six weeks on the job, Barrett was dismissed. ``The owner told me that two of my female co-workers read my fiction, got scared, shared it with their husbands and then went to my boss and said, `Either he goes or we go,''' Barrett said. ``They thought the character in the stories was me.''

Now Barrett, a specialist in new media, stocks groceries on the night shift for $8 an hour, with no benefits. His former employer declined to comment.

And though there hardly seems to be a national epidemic of people losing their jobs over their home pages, Cameron Barrett is not the only person in this situation. Workers in Virginia, Texas and California said they had been dismissed or disciplined for the content of their Web pages, even though the pages are maintained with their own computers, time and money. Others said they had been ordered to modify their pages.

Both groups said a common directive was to remove any reference to where they work, making it difficult to publish a resume online.

The dismissals are legal, experts in employment law say. Nearly every American worker is an ``at will'' employee, meaning ``you can be fired for a good reason, a bad reason or no reason at all,'' said Mayer Freed, a professor of law at Northwestern University. ``People say, `There ought to be a law.' But there's not. There would be a huge cost to the economy if every firing would be the subject of a lawsuit.''

Although they may not break new legal ground, the Web page cases do reveal a culture clash between longstanding, unwritten standards of corporate propriety and the new perspective of Web-savvy employees - the kind of workers that companies are clamoring for.

The employees, often right out of college or high school, are accustomed to publishing online their narcissistic scrapbooks of highly personal poetry, photos, and a lot of thinking out loud about sex and religion and sex and politics and sex.

Many of these younger workers have been on the Internet for years, comfortably saying to strangers what they would not say to a friend at work. But now millions of people have personal (but public) Web pages - America Online, the largest online service, is adding more than 100,000 a month - while still more of their co-workers and managers and parents are learning to find those pages on the Web.

In Virginia, more than opinion is revealed on the Web site of Lizz Sommerfield, 23, a 1996 Yale graduate and Internet engineer who goes by ``SexyChyck.'' As SexyChyck, Sommerfield poses for 1,000 visitors a week in her leopard-print underwear. It's not the full-blown nakedness the Web is known for, but she does carry ads for hard-core pornographic sites. ``I do it because it's fun,'' Sommerfield said. ``I like the attention.''

Her previous employer, a mom-and-pop publishing company, ordered her to remove any reference to the company, and she did, but felt violated and quit. ``It upset me that someone was spending so much time digging into my personal Web site and reading everything and giving it to my boss,'' Sommerfield said. ``I didn't feel like my boss needed to act like my parents.''

She quickly was hired at a large company with many Internet-savvy employees. She showed the site to her employer, who also asked her not to use the company's name. ``Almost everybody at the company has a personal Web page,'' she said. ``I am the only person who has been told, `You may not tell anybody where you work.' I feel kind of bad crumbling under society's foot.'' Companies are accustomed to dismissing employees for misuse of computers at work. Many company policies restrict use of e-mail, limit access to offensive Web sites and prohibit disclosure of confidential information. Few policies, if any, directly address personal Web pages.

The most similar situations in the noncomputer world involve dismissals of workers for posing nude in magazines like Playboy. Such dismissals - of New York City police officers, Wall Street stockbrokers, even a ball girl for the Chicago Cubs - have not been successfully challenged.

"It's an interesting dilemma,'' said Linnea McCord, a professor of business law at Pepperdine University. ``Tampering in people's privacy goes pretty far and gives the employer a lot of power. But if you can be fired for bad judgment for sitting in a pub lic place in your underwear, you can be fired for sitting in your underwear on the Internet.''

Employees have some safety only if they are dismissed for a reason relating to race, sex, religion, ethnicity, age or disability. Some employees are protected by union or personal contracts that limit reasons for dismissal. State and federal laws protect whistle-blowers, those who refuse to do something illegal, and workers who file claims for workers' compensation. Some local ordinances prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

There are no applicable First Amendment free-speech protections - the First Amendment restricts the actions of government, not business.

The employees dismissed in the Web-page cases are still free to speak out about their cases - and they do on their Web pages. Barrett and Sommerfield say they do not want to embarrass their employers. They only want to warn others about what could happen.

They were bothered, they say, more by Web illiteracy than by corporate heavy- handedness. Particularly galling is the prohibition against including Web links to their employers on their pages. Such links are common in online resumes.

As Sommerfield explained: "They said, `Well, we don't want to give anyone the possible impression that we endorse what's on there.' A link is not an endorsement. You can link to anyone you want, and they have no say in it. That's how the Web works.''

Barrett still publishes fiction on the Web. But readers must agree to a contract. Among the terms:

"By reading Cameron Barrett's experimental fiction, I understand that I am able to tell the difference between Cameron Barrett's fictional characters and Cameron Barrett, the person.

"I am a sensible human being and do not think that Cameron Barrett is a psychopath who is going to hunt down and kill his co-workers."