Employee Privacy Rights

Paper Summary:

The paper relates that, while employers certainly have the right to expect an honest day's work of their employees, employees should have the right to have a certain amount of privacy on the job; most Americans assume that they have a constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy: This is not the case. The author points out that, while monitoring phone calls may be one of the oldest ways in which employers infringe on workplace privacy, by far the most prolific is through the computer terminal even with software, which allows employers to monitor the keystrokes of their employees or the amount of time the computer terminal is idle. The paper stresses that most employees are unaware it is happening because of the clandestine way in which employers have imposed many of their monitoring techniques.

From the Paper:

"It is also important for employees to keep in mind that their work-related e-mail is not private. As with the computer terminal itself, because the employer owns the e-mail system, they have every legal right to review the contents of all e-mails sent across it. This includes incoming and outgoing e-mail. Furthermore, this e-mail monitoring does not stop with work-based e-mail accounts. Employers may also have access to private web-based e-mail accounts and instant message communications used by the employee from the work terminal such as accounts through Yahoo and Hotmail. No employee should assume that simply because the account is not owned by the employer, that they do not have a legal right to pour over personal e-mails and instant messages. As deplorable as it is, several lawsuits regarding this very issue have been decided in the employer's favor, including cases against Nissan, Pillsbury, and Epson."

More papers on Employee Privacy Rights:

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