Workplace Privacy Concept: Once, concerns about surveillance were couched primarily in the language of privacy and, possibly, freedom. Today surveillance sorts people into categories, assigning worth or risk, in ways that have real effects on their life-chances. Therefore, deep discrimination occurs, thus making surveillance not merely a matter of personal privacy but of social justice. In the drive towards increasing productivity and competition, workplace surveillance, whether covert or overt, is emerging as one of the most contentious issues facing employers, workers, unions, governments, and legal experts. There are case studies where surveillance in the workplace is clearly implemented in order to disempower workers, exploit them, and reduce any appearance of managements concern for employee well-being to a disguise for continued employee discipline. The empowering literature presents workplace surveillance as either endorsed by workers, or at least a segment thereof, or as being carried out with input from workers. However, computer-based monitoring is effective because it adapts a more nuanced approach to capturing both the empowering and disempowering experiences of workers.
Purpose of the research is to: 1) Identify to what extent employers should have the right to limit workplace privacy of their employees. 2) Find restrictions on the kinds of information that employers may obtain while at work 3) Discuss ethical issues of workplace surveillance 4) Propose alternative methods to stimulate employees productivity Relevancy in Todays Workplace: It is no accident that interest in privacy has grown by leaps and bounds in the past decade. This shift maps exactly onto the increased levels and pervasiveness of surveillance in commercial as well as in governmental and workplace settings. The workplace is where most adults spend roughly half of their waking hours. It is not surprising, therefore, that employment practices affect a broad range of privacy rights. With the exception of polygraph testing, there are few areas of workplace activities that are covered by the U.S. Constitution or national privacy laws. Accordingly, employers have a great deal of leeway in collecting data on their employees, regulating access to personnel files, and disclosing file contents to outsiders. In addition to the issue of personnel files, workplace privacy involves such practices as polygraph testing, drug testing, computer and telephone monitoring, and interference with personal lifestyle.
The Term Paper on Workplace Privacy 2
... 2000. Hebert. (2000). Employee Privacy Law, Volume 2, Chapter 12, West Group, 2000. Workers Privacy Part II: Monitoring and Surveillance in the Workplace. (1993).International Labor Office, ... safety, customer relations or legal obligation. By the way, monitoring employees, employers can reduce security risks and sexual harassment But from the ...
All of these practices stem from a combination of modern employer concerns -employee theft, drug abuse, productivity, courtesy and the protection of trade secrets — and technological advances that make it more economical to engage in monitoring and testing. The result for employees, however, is a dramatic increase in workplace surveillance. Despite the general absence of federal protection for worker privacy, there are some important limits on employers, due mainly to a variety of state constitutional provisions and statutes and the emergence of a common law right to privacy that creative attorneys are invoking on behalf of employees who have been victimized by intrusive practices. But privacy is both contested, and confined in its scope. Culturally and historically relative, privacy has limited relevance in some contexts. As we shall see in a moment, everyday surveillance is implicated in contemporary modes of social reproduction-it is a vital means of sorting populations for discriminatory treatment-and as such it is unclear that it is appropriate to invoke more privacy as a possible solution. Of course, fair information practices do go some way to addressing the potential inequalities generated, or at least facilitated, by surveillance as social sorting.
The Essay on Enemies of the State: Privacy and Surveillance
After the September 11, 2001 attacks, the film Enemy of the State is perhaps much more relevant today, when balancing between individual freedoms and privacy and the need for securing the country’s borders, than it was when it was released. The NSA, National Security Agency, put in place secret programs for electronic surveillance shortly after September 11. The ownership as well as the control of ...
Todays aspect of surveillance in a world of mobilities is that numerous new devices are available for pinpointing the location of data subjects. These represent a specific development in the computing and telecommunications industries, and are based on wireless telephony, video, newly available GPS data, and, of course, searchable databases.
Bibliography:
How to unearth the IT moles, Financial Times Ltd. 2006 Snooping Bosses – Sep. 11, 2006, Time inc.,2006. E-Mail and Internet Monitoring and the Workplace: Do Employees Have a Right to Privacy? Journal article by Sharlene A. Mcevoy; Communications and the Law, Vol. 24, 2002 Naked at Work: Pssst! the Boss Is Watching Magazine article by Sonja D. Brown; Black Enterprise, Vol.
34, December 2003 The Global Reach of Privacy Invasion Magazine article by Erika Waak; The Humanist, Vol. 62, November 2002.
