Employee Privacy Since the 1992

Employee Privacy

Since the 1992 federal court decision of Deal v. Spears employee privacy has become no less a complex issue, and in fact, may now be even more complex than what it was at that time. The 1992 Deal v. Spears case dealt primarily with punitive damages to a small business because of actions taken by the owner(s) in regards to monitoring employee conversations. Two individuals (Sibbie Deal and Calvin Lucas) sued the owners (Newell and Juanita Spears) of the company (White Oak Package Store) for illegal monitoring of what they considered private conversations on the telephone. The monitoring provided a basis for one of the individuals (Sibbie) to be fired from her job at White Oak. The court affirmed the decision by a lower court that the employers had illegally monitored the conversations between the two, but that they had not done so maliciously.

The employee and her cohort were awarded a total of $40,000 but they wanted punitive damages as well. The court decided, "it is difficult to conceive of a case less appropriate for punitive damages than this one" (United States, 1992, p. 6).

In 1992 employers were able to monitor the activities of their employees including the recording of phone conversations of those employees as long as the employee knew in advance that such recordings were taking place. Spears attempted to argue that he and his wife had warned Sibbie that her conversations may have to be monitored but they did not explicitly state that such monitoring was taking place.

Secondly, Spears argued that it was his right to intercept such conversations because it was done during business hours over the business phone. The court disagreed with both of those arguments.

Much of this case has to do with the differences between what is considered the rights of employees during working hours and the rights of employers who are paying the employees to conduct business and not pleasure during those working hours. The complexity in 1992 focused around the telephone and ongoing conversations, while currently the arguments focus on computer use.

One recent article espoused the following statement concerning technology in the workplace; "these products have tremendous capabilities to monitor employees, such as showing the online activities of employees, including websites visited and for how long, as well as allowing employers to monitor the use of chat rooms, programs run, files used, and e-mail sent and received" (Williams, 2008, pg. 348).

These capabilities should be a concern to employees, especially since a vast majority of individuals now have access to email through their work computers. In 2005 seventy seven million workers had access to computers in the workplace and 63% of those workers admitted to accessing personal emails from those computers.

The law is clear in the case of monitoring emails at the workplace and the differences between that monitoring and the monitoring of websites etc.

One recent article states; "The privacy issue is well settled when an employer monitors email sent through the company's own email system. Employers may unequivocally monitor any message that utilizes company-provided email" (Sherman, 2007, pg. 649). Problems arise when the employer attempts other methods monitoring as Sherman notes; "The law is not clear, however, when an employer accesses an employee's webmail" (Sherman, pg. 649). Similar to the Deal v Spears case, the employer must take certain precautions in order to secure the right of monitoring. Many companies have developed policies and guidelines that are communicated to the employee in order to meet those requirements, but there are plenty of employee rights organizations that worry about infringement of employee privacy.

As technology can afford anonymity so to can it provide evidence that see through such anonymity. Thomas Jefferson once wrote; "Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made... And opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy" (Foley ed., 1900, pg. 726). Though computers were invented long after Jefferson had passed through this world, his words are appropriate even today. Laws, employees and employers must all change with the times.