"Some Times Art Does Imitate Life."
David Steward posted a Dilbert Comic strip on the company bulletin board that compared bad decision makers to drunken lemurs. The management took offense to the comic strip, and looked at security cameras to identify which employee posted the comic strip. Once they found out it was Steward they fired him for misconduct, and stated that he had "insulted the managers." Then the company denied him unemployment
when he filed for it (McGuire, 2008).
I understand that people need to be respectful to their employers, but I feel that to fire someone because they put a comic strip that is published in the daily paper on the bulletin board, is going too far. The company could have taken the comic down and given the employee a warning if it actually bothered them that badly. It was not Steward's intent to directly criticize the management but posted it because he thought it was funny and wanted to boost moral. There are many ways that this could have been handled and the employer took the wrong one. The company must not have had a policy in place preventing this from being displayed or Steward would not have won the court battle to get his unemployment pay. They should have set guidelines of what can and cannot be displayed and if comics are not allowed then they should send out an announcement banning them rather than just firing people because someone took offense.
I think it is in good humor that when Dilbert author Scott Adams found out what happened to Steward he directly wrote this into his strips the following week where the PHB (Pointy Haired Boss) fires one of the employees for... you guessed it, posting a comic comparing managers to drunken lemurs. When the employee is asked if he thinks drunken lemurs are like managers, his reply is, "No. Some lemurs can hold their liquor."
This is the original citing.
McGuire T. (2008). Dilbert Firing. Associated Press. Extracted from the World
Wide Web on 6/20/08 from http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Page/document/video/vs?id=RTGAM.20080225.wvdilbert0225&ids=RTGAM.20080225.wvdilbert0225
The link was taken down after I wrote the blog and the news article can now be found at:
Reference Cite
5 comments:
The Dilbert column was simply to boost morale and offer up a little humor in the workplace. By no means was this ever intentionally malicious in any way.
I agree with the blog author in this case. A verbal or written warning would have sufficed, particularly if the employee had no previous violations. Termination, in this case, seems rather drastic.
I think that the firing of the employee over posting a comic was in poor taste. Have we gotten to a point in society that we have lost our sense of humor? The comic did not included any information that could be considered to be offensive. At the end of the day it was nothing more that a comic.
I agree with the original post and comments that this is an extremely drastic reaction. I think this is a great example of what the comic talks about regarding problems made by people who have too much time on their hands. It seems like there should be a lot more productive things to do than review surveillance cameras to figure out who posted a dilbert comic.
To post a comic like this should at worst be a verbal warning. Then a memo should be sent out to all employees about not posting Dilbert comics as they might contain accurate information. Companies have taken this issue to serious.
I agree with all of you.
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