Chapter 4: We re From the Government and We re Here to Help

Overview

Every business, even those small enough for management to know and trust each and every employee, collects large amounts of personal information. Even if they do not need details about you for purposes of identification, businesses nonetheless collect personal information about you because they are required to do so by a wide variety of governmental agencies.

For the first century and a half of this country's history, the federal and state governments took a laissez-faire attitude toward employers and employees. Over a remarkably short time, however, a combination of economic events and political good intentions combined to spark the government's interest in gathering information about employees across the country. Beginning with an innocuous form the size of a postcard, the government's collection of employee data has mushroomed into an enormous enterprise that creates a library's worth of data each year and costs employers billions annually in compliance costs.

As we'll see over the course of this chapter, each of the legislative initiatives requiring businesses to collect and report employee information was motivated by an arguably valid public policy concern; taken collectively, however, they represent an ever-growing invasion into employee privacy, helping to create an atmosphere for further intrusions by businesses themselves.