Structure


The Naked Employee begins with a discussion of some of the reasons for workplace surveillance. In writing about this issue, it seemed important to me to recognize that the successful operation of any business does in fact depend on a certain amount of investigation about and surveillance of employees.

The remainder of the book, however, implicitly asks the questions of how much surveillance is too much. Beginning with the job application process, The Naked Employee looks at a wide variety of investigatory tools and surveillance techniques. Some, I argue, are clearly legitimate when they are designed to produce information that is relevant about an employee's job performance, and illegitimate when they are used to gather information beyond that. Other surveillance techniques, I believe, are inherently unreasonable (hidden cameras, for instance). My hope is that as readers work their way through this book, they will be able to decide for themselves where they would draw the line between reasonable and unreasonable surveillance. At the very least, readers may spend more time looking over their shoulder, which is not necessarily a bad thing. As the joke t-shirt puts it so well, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you."

The book concludes with a summary of the efforts by Congress to impose some limits on workplace surveillance, most of which failed to pass. I believe that those various measures should have passed and in fact, did not go far enough. While the political tide is clearly running the other way, my hope is that this book (which is, after all, simply a snapshot of a rapidly moving target) will encourage employees, unions, and their elected representatives to seriously debate the issue and take action to impose some reasonable restrictions on workplace surveillance.

Frederick S. Lane III
Burlington, Vermont
December 11, 2002




The Naked Employee. How Technology Is Compromising Workplace Privacy
Naked Employee, The: How Technology Is Compromising Workplace Privacy
ISBN: 0814471498
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 93

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