No,no – spice it up!
Illustration:John Shakespeare.
“A senior manager recognises a junior from her OnlyFans page and gives her preferential rostering. He later sends her messages on her OnlyFans account asking for the favour to be returned …”
Questions followed. When does the buxom policewoman come in? Is there a half-clad orderly peering through a crack in the door? What about a doctor?
These filthy (and poorly plotted) fantasy scenarios,and more,were contained in an the statutory body sent on Wednesday to the state’s 120,000 registered nurses and midwives. The council’s job is to protect the public against nurses and midwives “whose conduct,performance or health may represent a risk to the public or is not in the public interest”. On this occasion,the council was protecting the public against nurses and/or midwives allegedly posting intimate material on the OnlyFans website.
OnlyFans is not exactly a porn site,but that’s what almost all of its 120 million users think it is. One of the COVID pandemic’s big winners, from viewers paying “tips” for intimate material they see. The site has pocketed a 20 per cent cut.
If there were nurses posting,according to OnlyFans CEO Amrapali Gan,they were doing so on “a safe,content-inclusive platform that allows people to share and monetise content exclusively with their community”.
Unfortunately,according to reports received by the Nursing and Midwifery Council,their “exclusive community” in this case could have included patients,colleagues and others in the hospital system. According to Gan’s definition,OnlyFans is not just about home-made porn and the nurses might well have been posting videos of themselves cleaning out bedpans. More likely,they were posting intimate images. (They would be in even bigger trouble for showing images of themselves cleaning bedpans,which would be employer property.)
Once complaints had been received,over at the office of the Nursing and Midwifery Council,a statutory body,hearts fluttered and minds raced. Whoever composed the email to nurses and midwives was hard at work imagining what might happen to them when they got into “difficult situations”.
The nurses about whom the alleged complaints had been made were not,as far as we know,wearing nurses’ uniforms. Nor did the posts have to be created on work time to warrant a warning or even dismissal. From what has been disclosed,their posts didn’t identify their workplaces or use work technology.
The same could not be said of the organisation overseeing them,composing smut on a work computer while wearing work clothes. The nurses could have been at home,on holidays,and wearing,or not wearing,a fez or a lumberjacket. It doesn’t matter. If the images got into the hands of a patient or a senior manager,the nurse could,under Australian law,be sacked.
The public gut feeling,judging by social media reaction,is that this action is an invasion of employees’ private lives. And if nurses and midwives were paid what they are worth,they might not have to look for alternative sources of income. (Or not;the economic motive is not the only one for exhibitionism.)
Anxiety about employer intrusion is increasingly part of our popular culture,with the hitportraying a dystopia where employers implant in their employees’ brains a device that separates their working from their non-working memory. Until it fails. With 14 Emmy nominations and millions of viewers around the world (though Apple is too concerned about its privacy to release streaming figures),Severance hit a chord with the wider public,if not with the makers of employment law.
A full page ad supporting Israel Folau in the Daily Telegraph,paid for by the Australian Christian Lobby.Supplied
A 2020 survey for the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner found 83 per cent of Australians want more protections for their privacy. But,and state acts are more concerned with data protection than stopping your bosses from poking their noses into your business. And if you’ve put the information out into the public,you can’t then claim that your privacy has been invaded (unless your name is Harry or Meghan).
Employment law has moved in the opposite direction from public sentiment. In 2011,Fair Work Australia upheld the sacking of a who criticised the company’s payroll department on his Facebook page,saying his criticism amounted to a “threat” against a colleague. In 2018,federal immigration bureaucrat lost her case in the High Court after being dismissed for tweeting comments criticising the department’s policy in 2013. Her comments were posted anonymously and in her own time,but that didn’t protect her.
Employment contracts have been on the creep for the past decade,specifically requiring that employees not undermine or bring into disrepute the organisation they work for,even when they’re on their own time. Codes of conduct,broader in interpretation,extend these powers further. And when gaps open up,the common law,as read by the courts,is frequently read in the employers’ favour.
The action against the nurses might seem like social conservatism,but employers’ reach into workers’ online activities in their private time is politically colour blind. Cotton On had the law on its side in disciplining employee Amber Holt in 2019 for egging Scott Morrison,even though she was not egging him in Cotton On’s clothes or Cotton On’s name. (She merely did so in the name of two-thirds of Australian voters.)
SBS’s in 2015 for tweeting negatively about Anzac Day. Three years later, for online comments about abortion law in Tasmania.,most notably,lost his rugby contract in 2019 after posting online that God would send gay people to hell. As the nurses and midwives have found,the sackable offence doesn’t even have to be real. Fantasy is enough.
The law offers some protection. In 2019,the Federal Circuit Court overruled James Cook University’s action in sacking a physics professor,Peter Ridd,for criticising colleagues,saying that as an academic he had a right to intellectual freedom. That’s not a protection the allegedly naughty nurses can claim either. All they have on their side is the public sentiment that there has been an overreaction and that if their senior managers have been watching them on OnlyFans,it’s probably not the public who need protecting,it’s the nurses themselves.
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