Virgin Atlantic fires crew for criticising it on Facebook
Virgin Atlantic fired 13 cabin crew for what it called inappropriate behavior on Facebook. The airline said that their actions on the social networking site “brought the company into disrepute”.
The BBC reported that Virgin Atlantic took action after reports that staff used Facebook to insult passengers, calling them “chavs” as well as criticizing the airline’s safety standards. Though the Facebook messages have been removed, it is understood that they were related to specific planes flying from Gatwick.
According to the crew on Facebook, the supposed planes were full of cockroaches. Just as damaging was their assertion that the airline’s jet engines were replaced four times in one year.
The airline made an official statement confirming the dismissal of the 13 cabin crew, saying: “Virgin Atlantic can confirm that 13 members of its cabin crew will be leaving the company after breaking staff policies due to totally inappropriate behavior.
An unnamed spokesman for the airline did add there was “a time and a place for Facebook”. But he said there was no justification for it to be used as a sounding board for staff of any company to criticize the very passengers who ultimately pay their salaries.
“We have numerous internal channels for our staff to feed back legitimate and appropriate issues relating to the company.”
Being fired for blogging about work is a common and oft-told story, but being sacked for using Facebook is a new novelty. But as the social networking site grows even more popular, it’s likely that there could be a trend.
The crew members involved were admittedly doing something risky by publicizing the company’s dirty laundry on a space as public as MySpace. Did they use no privacy precautions? Or were they unaware of the limits to information privacy on the site? The moral here is just as you shouldn’t blog about your work, using Facebook to rant about your job is a bad idea.
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October 31st, 2008
I’m actually very glad to hear this. There are a number of very serious rights issues in many things that Google is doing. Someone has to at least stop and think…
November 1st, 2008
Um, Michael, what’s your agenda? Facebook=Google? No. So what’s your point?
Granted, these folks acted pretty stupidly it seems. But do folks not have a right to “blow the whistle” if there’s a serious problem? If it turned out Virgin DID have a safety issue (NOT saying they do!) hidden from the public by their internal systems, instead of criticising these employees we would be praising them.
November 2nd, 2008
It’s difficult to know exactly what was said by whom in this case when most of us only get to read things second-hand (at best). But Virgin’s actions show that they, at least, were unhappy with what was said.
This is a good example of how social networks need us to adopt new social norms. To us, Facebook feels as though we are in an exclusive group of our friends but in reality we’re in perhaps the most public space possible. When we discuss things we’re not having a private conversation but a very public one.
I’ve written some more about this and about how we need to adopt new social manners in social networks like Facebook, if anybody is interested:
http://blog.freshnetworks.com/2008/11/why-you-should-be-careful-what-you-say-on-facebook/
Matt
FreshNetworks
July 18th, 2011
I love your blog.. very nice colors & theme. Did you make this website yourself or did you hire someone to do it for you? Plz answer back as I’m looking to design my own blog and would like to find out where u got this from. thanks