/ 6 November 2006

Jo’burg city council in a porn pickle

Meet Rose … this old bird sure does love her toys! Rose will put that thing just about anywhere you ask her to, and she’ll love it. She gets hornier and hornier with age and is at her sexual peak.

Two middle managers of the Johannesburg city council have already met Rose. They’ve seen the pornographic pictures of her on Mature-appeal.com, which is one of the pornographic websites through which the pair had been surfing during their employment at the Johannesburg City Council, according to a report in the Star newspaper.

The two council employees resigned last year in the wake of an investigation that found them in possession of hundreds of dirty pictures, video clips and music files, the daily newspaper reported on Monday.

It was found in the article that an ”alarming number” of council employees — from secretaries to senior directors — are downloading, watching and distributing pornography.

The two managers (who were not named) had also surfed websites such as Yummy-cummy.com (”fresh young teen nudists and models”), a sexy lingerie online store called Wickedtempations.com and Fetishsexorgy.com (”see lovely Anna discover the versatility of her new toy”).

The city has had to investigate its workers for possessing child pornography, downloading copyrighted music and movies and using highly illegal software to cover their tracks, the report said.

But although there have been 200 such cases over the past two years, there was no mention of any employees being fired.

The director of communications for the City of Johannesburg, Gabu Tugwana, told the Star that ”appropriate action” is always taken and illegal acts such as the downloading or distribution of child pornography will be reported to the South African Police Service.

”We acknowledge the challenges brought by employees’ usage of the internet, intranet and e-mail, hence the existing clear and well-defined policies and procedures regulating access to these facilities,” said Tugwana.

But the interest in pornography is not only confined to the Johannesburg City Council. Five Durban labour department employees lost their jobs in October when they were found to have distributed a pornographic e-mail that showed a couple in a steamy sexual act.

The porn-surfing employees of the Johannesburg city council could be part of a global epidemic that British author David Bolchover describes as ”employee disengagement”.

In his book, The Living Dead: Switched Off, Zoned Out — The Shocking Truth about Office Life, Bolchover discusses the boredom and demotivation of employees in ”process-obsessed” and poorly managed corporations and how they do everything they can to avoid doing any work.

He cites a raft of statistics to demonstrate just how widespread a problem this disengagement has become, one of them being that 70% of internet porn sites are accessed during the 9am-to-5pm working day.

Tugwana did not respond to questions submitted by the Mail & Guardian Online.