Chapter 10: In Defense of Employee Privacy Rights

Overview

Thanks largely to the phenomenal advances in technology that have occurred in the last twenty years, the time has come for a well-focused national debate on the proper boundaries of employee privacy. Over the last half-century, Congress has made occasional efforts to address the issue of employee privacy, but comprehensive legislation has generally been strenuously opposed by a coalition of business interests. At the same time, labor organizations have not paid particularly close attention to privacy as a workplace issue, given the difficult and more high-profile struggles required to protect jobs, wages, and worker safety. The combination of these factors has created a situation in which employee privacy in the workplace is virtually nonexistent.

The most perturbing development is the growing erasure of any distinction between work and home. The challenge that we face today is not so much how to protect privacy in the workplace—that can best be described as a cultural Maginot line that has long since been circumvented—but how to protect the personal and household privacy of people who are also workers.

As we saw in Chapter 1, there are powerful forces that encourage businesses to peer through the windows of our lives. Any effective effort to shore up employee privacy has to take into consideration the enormous economic and judicial challenges that are facing employers these days.

In fact, the employee privacy situation today strongly resembles that at the end of the nineteenth century, when businesses regularly hired labor spies to investigate not only employees' on-the-job behavior, but also their private lives. While we no longer live in company towns, where our employer is both boss and landlord, the result is effectively the same—an intrusive examination of how we live our lives, with potentially serious economic consequences if our employers do not approve. And thanks to the technological advances that have occurred, the intrusiveness of the inquiry that employers today can command far exceeds anything that Andrew Carnegie, Franklin Gowen, or Henry Frick could have imagined.

The issue is how we as a society should view employee privacy in the workplace. It is not enough simply to pay lip service to principles of individual freedom and human dignity when those principles are largely ignored by employers. While some states have addressed various aspects of this problem, the result has been a hodgepodge of laws that frustrates employer and employee alike. If we are serious about balancing employee privacy with the more invasive aspects of our economic system—and we should be— then the time has come for Congress to establish limits on employer voyeurism.