Xan Gordon, a Starbucks employee of three years, was fired on Aug 29th for turning off the Wi-Fi at his workplace. Two days prior, a number of men had been using Starbucks' new free Wi-Fi to watch pornography while customers, some of them children, could see and hear. In order to verify whether or not it was within his power as a Starbucks employee to pull the plug and after a number of complaints from customers, Xan went through all the steps, asking supervisors, calling managers, and even looking through the employee handbook (which not only said nothing about this act being against policy but actually explained how to do it) before cutting the public Wi-Fi. His firing comes after three years of employment in which Xan, a Coffee Master, Learning Coach, de-facto equipment technician and tinkerer, had no history of disciplinary action. What he did was not against policy.
First off, you don't "just say yes" to customers who want to view porn at the store. And you don't "punish" customers doing legitimate work on the Internet by cutting off their Internet.
Here's what you do: You tell the customers to stop viewing porn, or leave the store -- now!
It's as simple as that.
Gordon's letter continues:
"Xan is an active member of the IWW Starbucks Workers Union who was known in the community for being intimately familiar with all of Starbucks' policies, as well as local and federal labor laws. It is assumed that his firing came as a result of his association with the famous labor union, not for his actions related to the Wi-Fi."
I don't know if Gordon's union activism came into play here, but I do know that he didn't handle this correctly. You don't shut off Wi-Fi because of a few "misbehaving" customers; you tell them to get lost. (By the way, I'm not anti-union -- I was a union member, in the Newspaper Guild, for years -- I'm pro-common sense.)
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