There was a bizarre news story earlier this month about dozens of workers at a nuclear plant in Ontario being fired for personal use of company email.
There are a number of wrinkles in the story. The workers in question were not employees of the operator Bruce Power but contract employees. And the company has been stingy with details of the alleged misdeeds, describing them only as improper use of email.
The story raises a more general question about the importance of email in our lives, and how extensive an employee’s use of the company email system would need to be in order to amount to “just cause” for firing.