Glenn to Cathy Seip’s column on “the Queen of Sky”, a flight attendant who was fired for pictures posted on her blog, labelling it “politically correct prudery”.
Queen of Sky’s blog is here, and the photos in question — showing QoS in mildly suggestive poses — are here.
The problem with the photos, I think, is less that they are slightly risque (look for yourself; I’d probably not even put a “not safe for work” label on them generally). It is that, as commentors on QoS’s blog have pointed out, they were taken in her company uniform, and on a company plane.
Now I’m generally no friend to those who fire bloggers, and I try to always be a friend to pretty ladies who like taking naughty pictures. But I think I have to take exception with Glenn here; this looks less like a case of “politically correct prudery” to me, and more like a case of an employer punishing an employee for misuse of company property and deliberate abuse of the company’s image.
If QoS had stuck to naughty pictures of herself in civilian gear, I’d be behind her. Er, supporting her. Um — speaking out positively to argue on her behalf. (Whew).
But she didn’t. She quite deliberately tried to use the property (uniform and plane) and image of her employer to benefit her side business (her blog). (And yes, I know that the pictures don’t directly identify Delta, but Cathy Seip indicates in her column, “frequent flyers could tell from the route references that it was Delta”, which makes sense to me).
We also don’t seem to know anything about Delta’s side of the story. Going to Cathy’s column again, she indicates that QoS was “first suspended without pay and then fired”, so there might even have been a warning given before her termination.
At any rate, I think this is a bad case for bloggers to stand on when it comes to “blogger free speech”. It is reasonable to demand that employers don’t hold legitimately independent work done by a blogger against them at their Day Jobs. It’s not reasonable to expect our employers to permit us to use the company’s property as props in a photo shoot trading on the company image for blog profit.