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Employee Monitoring: Is There Privacy in the Workplace? Is there a thing as not enough privacy? People don’t have privacy at home, at church, and now not even at work. Why are employers putting so much emphasis on privacy in the workplace? Should employers be allowed to invade in on your phone calls, emails and interoffice conversations? Employers want to be sure their employees are doing a good job, but employees don't want their every sneeze or trip to the water cooler logged. That's the essential conflict of workplace monitoring. New technologies make it possible for employers to monitor many aspects of their employees' jobs, especially on telephones, computer terminals, through electronic and voice mail, and when employees are using the Internet. Such monitoring is virtually unregulated. Therefore, unless company policy specifically states otherwise (and even this is not assured), your employer may listen, watch and read most of your workplace communications. Telephone Monitoring Can my employer listen to my phone calls at work? In most instances, the answer is yes. For example, employers may monitor calls with clients or customers for reasons of quality control. However, when the parties to the call are all in California, state law requires that they be informed that the conversation is recorded or monitored by either putting a beep tone on the line or playing a recorded message. (California Public Utilities Commission General Order 107-B, www.cpuc.ca.gov/Published/Graphics/567.pdf). Not every business is aware of this requirement, so your calls might still be monitored without a warning. Federal law, which regulates phone calls with persons outside the state, does allow unannounced monitoring for business-related calls. (See Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 USC 2510, et. seq., www.law.cornell.edu/uscode.) An important exception is made for personal calls. Under federal case law, when an employer realizes the call is personal, he or she must immediately stop monitoring the call. (Watkins v. L.M. Berry & Co., 704 F.2d 577, 583 (11th Cir. 1983)) However, when employees are told not to make personal calls from specified business phones, the employee then takes the risk that calls on those phones may be monitored. Privacy Tip: The best way to ensure the privacy of your personal calls made at work is to use your own mobile phone, a pay phone, or a separate phone designated by your employer for personal calls. If a headset is worn, conversations with co-workers are subject to be monitored. The conversations you have with co-workers are subject to monitoring by your employer in the same way that your conversations with clients or customers are. If you wear a headset, you should use the same care you would if you were talking to a customer or client on the phone. Some headsets have "mute" buttons which allow you to turn off the transmitter when you are not using the telephone. Employers can obtain records of my phone calls. Telephone numbers dialed from phone extensions can be recorded by a device called a pen register. It allows the employer to see a list of phone numbers dialed by your extension and the length of each call. This information may be used to evaluate the amount of time spent by employees with clients. Employers often use pen registers to monitor employees with jobs in which telephones are used extensively. Frequently, employees are concerned that the information gathered from the pen register is unfairly used to evaluate their efficiency with clients without consideration of the quality of service. Computer Monitoring If you have a computer terminal at your job, it may be your employer's window into your workspace. There are several types of computer monitoring. 1. Employers can use computer software that enables them to see what is on the screen or stored in the employees' computer terminals and hard disks.
Approximate Word count = 2416
Approximate Pages = 9.7
(250 words per page double spaced)
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