Employee Handbook Privacy Section ABC Widget Company: Employee Handbook Privacy Section

What privacy rights issues should be addressed?

In the Age of Information, there are increasing concerns being voiced about what can legitimately be expected to be kept private, and how these issues affect employees' rights in the workplace. According to Hayden, Hendricks and Novak (1990, most adults spend approximately one-half of their waking hours in the workplace today, and it is therefore not surprising that employment practices affect a broad range of privacy rights. With the sole exception of polygraph ("lie-detector") testing, there are not many areas of workplace activities that are addressed by the U.S. Constitution or national privacy laws. As a result, employers in the United States have a great deal of flexibility in collecting data on their employees, regulating their access to personnel files, and disclosing the contents of employee files to those outside the organization. Besides the issue of personnel files, workplace privacy involves such practices as polygraph testing, drug testing, computer and telephone monitoring, and interference with personal lifestyle (Hayden et al., 1990).

All of these issues are based on a combination of contemporary employer concerns about employee theft, drug abuse, productivity, courtesy and the protection of proprietary secrets, as well as the technological innovations that have made it cost effective for many companies to engage in monitoring and testing. The result for employees, however, has been a dramatic increase in workplace surveillance and a perceived invasion of their privacy (Hayden et al., 1990). Therefore, it is the goal of ABC Widget Company ("ABC") to provide each of its employees with the maximum degree of privacy allowable while balancing the needs of the company to maintain control over its proprietary information and to manage its day-to-day affairs. To this end, the following privacy...

It is the policy of ABC that all employees will be afforded the maximum amount of protection for any personal information maintained by the company. Further, employees will not be subjected to random drug testing or random workplace searches; however, if an employee is suspected of being under the influence of intoxicants or alcohol while at work, or if an employee is suspected of theft or other violations of company policies set forth elsewhere in this employee handbook, the employee may be required by ABC management to undergo drug testing, counseling or questioning by company security as the case may be. It is the policy of ABC that the company will not engage in routine surveillance of its employees in the workplace and, although it has a right to do so, this approach is not felt to be in the best interests of the company or its employees (Backer & O'Hara, 1991).
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Information technology (IT) and e-mail privacy. According to Nathan Watson (2001), the monitoring of workplace e-mail is an increasingly controversial issue that needs to be addressed by employers today. This author points out that union and employee advocacy groups have complained that such practices are a violation of employee workplace privacy, and may cause work-related stress and low morale. Further, Watson notes that some employers have used such practices in an unfair manner to discipline or discharge employees; while public employees…