CYBERSPACE — Employers are aware now more than ever of the amount of time that some of their workers are flushing away on adult websites. Studies show that over 70-percent of porn is downloaded during working hours – 9:00am to 5:00pm — which has companies ready to spend to curb their employees’ habits.NetAddiction.com, a site offering treatment services for those with online porn and/or chat room sex addictions, states broadly that the cost of employee “internet abuse” accounts for 4 billion dollars a year in lost productivity. Though no resource for that figure is given, the site is happy to sell companies a guide book designed to keep people from indulging their online habits.
It’s a little late for West Chester Township, PA to get on board with keeping former auditor H. Scott Campbell in line. In 2003, his co-workers regularly complained that he was viewing porn online in full view of those around him. In 2006 when his bosses finally took his laptop away, they found 38 downloaded adult videos and some online gambling info—but no actual work.
Campbell was a local government employee — a finance director for the Township. Of Campbell’s online hijinks, manager Bruce Snell said, “It’s tough to plan when you don’t know how much money you have.”
In Virginia in 2005, four employees of the University of Virginia were investigated and at least two lost their jobs within five months for viewing porn at work, prompting the University to publish a warning in the employee newsletter. This year in the city of Richmond, police found “several hundred” visits to adult sites on city-owned computers. They identified personal logons of more than 100 city employees in at least 10 city agencies — including the Department of Public Works, the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office and the Sheriff’s Office.
In St. Louis, MO, a woman has filed a sexual harassment suit over her exposure to online porn while employed by the city government. She says having to view porn at work every day for five years caused her “embarrassment, humiliation and severe emotional distress.”
With every naughty no-no thing springs up industries of people willing to take cash to stop the “bad thing” from happening and the business of blocking porn at work with filters and firewalls is thriving. Wavecrest Computing makes billions a year making and maintaining filtering software used by Proctor & Gamble and the United States Justice Department, among other government and non-government clients. The sexual repression in our culture that drives people to look at porn in an environment that they really should not be viewing porn in will keep companies like Wavecrest in business for a long time.
