Next time you're thinking of using your office computer to look up the latest holiday offers on the Internet, think again. It could cost you your job.

In the majority of Irish companies there are no guidelines as to whether you can use your office terminal to check up on things of interest to you personally.

However, a precedent for dismissing employees for what firms consider inappropriate use of company facilities has already been set in the US and Britain.

Companies, by installing an inexpensive piece of software, can see what websites each employee visits, for how long they visit, on what day and what they did when they were at the site.

The information is also logged on the person's desktop and can be retrieved easily.

Ms Lois Franxhi, an IT manager at Focus Management Consultants, was sacked last July for using the Internet to book a holiday. In what could prove to be a landmark case, an industrial tribunal found in favour of her employers when she contested the dismissal. Her employer was able to produce clear and exact records of her time spent surfing on the Net, and her e-mails, which they used as grounds for her dismissal.

With increasing use of e-mail and increased litigation against companies for libellous, sexist or racist communications by their employees, scanning of all emails entering or leaving the company for certain words which are classed as "unacceptable" is common place.

This practice may, however, be classed as an infringement of a person's right to privacy. Trade union IMPACT, which represents public service clerical workers, says e-mail could be considered the same as normal post. Employees and unions would find it unacceptable if their employers were allowed to open their letters and correspondence.

IMPACT says that Irish unions will resist widespread monitoring of staff e-mails just as they would reject the monitoring of phone calls.

Assistant general secretary of trade union, IMPACT, Mr Matt Staunton, said that a vacuum existed in the whole area, with no law on what workers could and could not do.

He said employee usage of email and Internet access was a growing issue in the Republic and IMPACT advised its branches to reach an agreement with their employers on what was and was not acceptable usage of company computers.

In the meantime, staff should be cautious when using e-mail and the Web at work.

The monitoring of PCs can give an inaccurate picture though. A worker's computer could be used by somebody else or an employee could receive unsolicited offensive e-mails.

Recent research has shown that 30 to 40 per cent of all Internet surfing is done by people in work and that 72 per cent of pornographic sites are viewed during working hours according to Mr John Ryan, sales director of Internet security company Entropy.

He said many companies had brought in Internet and e-mail monitoring systems to prevent their bandwidth being taken up by employees' e-mails containing data, voice or other attachments, which had been clogging up and slowing down their mail systems.

It is estimated a single employee will spend on average 220 man hours a year surfing the Net, representing a loss of £100,000 (€126,974) a year to a company employing 100 people.

Access to the Internet and email at work is emerging as a real issue for companies as they become more acutely aware that they are liable for their employees' activities.

Mr Kevin Langford, a senior associate specialising in employment law at Mason, Hayes, Curran solicitors, said that the 1998 Act on sexual harassment in the workplace set out employers' responsibilities.

Under the Act, which has recently come into force, employers are responsible for any action by an employee which could be considered harassment. Downloading pornography fell under the area of "gross misconduct" in employment law. Mr Langford said the employee had no right to notice and could be summarily dismissed, or fired on the spot, by the company. He said companies in Ireland were starting to draft policies on using company Internet and e-mail.

The managing director of Performix technologies, Mr Cathal McGloin, said most employees did not realise how much information their employers had on their activities at work.

He said the potential was there for employers to abuse this information, but he believed this did not happen.

Mr McGloin believed it was counterproductive for employers to monitor their employees without telling them.

Irish employment law and British law are one and the same, according to IMPACT, which leaves the door open for similar cases here.

A study by E-Scrooged showed that 56 per cent of employees surveyed, shopped online while at work. Nearly one out of every five employees said they shopped either very frequently or "somewhat frequently" from the corporate desktop.

With e-working being mooted as the next step forward in the electronic age, guidelines for workers are scarce on the ground.

A recent survey by British employment research specialists, Industrial Relations Services, found that 77 per cent of employers snooped on their employees' Internet use.

The British survey also showed that employment standards and workplace cultures varied so widely that "what may be allowed in one organisation is grounds for dismissal in another".

If unions and employers in Ireland do not act quickly and set down agreements and guidelines on computer usage, the area may become a very litigious one.