Porn in the Workplace: It May Cost Your Job and Unemployment Benefits

I recently published an article in The Michigan Employment Law Advisor, What's the Harm in a Little Work Place Porn? For Starters Unemployment Benefits, that offers important insight for employers and employees when it comes to accessing Internet pornography in the workplace and technology use policies.

The discharge and denial of unemployment benefits was based on misconduct by the former employee, which consisted of: 

• Visiting a number of inappropriate web sites, including "teenagecheerleaders.com," "sextelevision.net," and other sites involving swimsuit models and Victoria's Secret;


• These sites contained images of scantily dressed females, nudity, and other images considered pornographic;


• Receiving and keeping emails that were pornographic and that he "might have" instructed his computer to access a site like sextv.com; and


• In an eight hour day, records reflected approximately 3½ to 4 hours was spent by the former employee visiting these types of sites.

The article goes onto to discuss the winding procedural path taken by the unemployment compensation claim. But the key take away is:

1. The employer could have likely avoided the winding procedural path through the administrative review (where the denial of unemployment benefits was granted) up to the circuit court (where the denial was reversed) and over to the Court of Appeals (where the original denial was reinstated) if there was a technology use policy in place; or


2. The employee could have avoided this situation by not looking at porn in the first place or at least realized that the employer could and would monitor his Internet activity. 

For any network administrators, am I right in regard to the network traffic argument discussed in the full post?