Q. I detest my first name... but my boss insists I use it. Is that legal?

Carrie Mason-Draffen

12:18 PM EST, January 18, 2008

I've received a number of unusual questions over the years as a workplace advice columnist for Newsday, but an e-mail I received recently gave me pause.

It came from a 60-year-old customer-service employee from Farmingdale who wanted to know if his employer could legally force him to use his first name, which he loathes.

"I detest my first name to the point that I hate either hearing it or using it," he wrote. "I feel that my name is my property, and the company has no right to tell me how to use it."

It turns out that his employer can in fact legally require him to use his first name, according to a civil liberties expert, because no law addresses the issue. More about that later.

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The reasons people change their names are as varied as the initials themselves. Many people, like the e-mail writer, hate a name and ditch it in favor of initials or their middle names. Some who resort to initials do so to hide their identity or to build a unique persona.

Generations ago, some female authors adopted male noms de plume to get published. Many glitterati and literati use initials, such as the actor B.D. Wong and Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

Newton Jones Burkett III, a correspondent for WABC who lives in Laurel Hollow, became N.J. Burkett in a sort of Hollywood moment almost 19 years ago. In 1989, he was preparing to move from a small Hartford station to WABC-TV, when the station president and his agent suggested he change his name.

"They felt that Newton Jones Burkett sounded a bit aristocratic and made me somewhat less accessible," he said. He certainly didn't cultivate that image, said Burkett, who reports many stories on the streets of New York.

"I think of myself as a pretty accessible person," said Burkett, 45, "and one's name shouldn't have anything to do with it."

But he said he couldn't go along a wholesale name change because so many local people knew him -- he grew up in the metro area and graduated from Columbia University (he has a BA and MA). He also couldn't go along with a complete name makeover because of the business he's in.

"I'm in the truth business," he said, "and lying about my name wouldn't be the right thing to do."

His father had told him about N.J.'s great-grandfather, a Tennessee newspaper publisher known as J.W.N. Burkett -- short for John William Newton. The Ch. 7 reporter remembered the story while grappling with a name change over dinner with his wife.

"What about N.J. Burkett?" he said he asked her.

He said she smiled and said, "That's it."

But he was worried whether his dad, also Newton Jones, would disapprove. His father, however, paid him the highest compliment when he said, "I really think that using your initials has really distinguished you in the media market."

While Burkett's name change was encouraged by his employer, there are others -- like the one the writer works for -- who balk at the use of anything other than an employee's given first name. And such inflexibility is legal for nonunion private-sector workers.

"There is no law in this area, and when there is no law, the employer makes the law," said Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute in Princeton, N.J.

Since New York is an employment-at-will state, employees who refuse to honor company policy can be fired on the spot or fired for no reason at all. Public employees and union workers have some protections against such on-the-spot firings, he said.

Employers shouldn't minimize the importance of employees' name concerns, said Maltby, who admitted that his own middle name "is buried in a deep hole in my backyard.

"It's not trivial," he said. "Some people really have reasons to hate their name, and I am one of them."