Electronic Monitoring and the Loss of Privacy


In recent years there has been a steady increase in the number of electronic devices available that employers can use to monitor the behaviour of their employees . Employers can, and do, use all-purpose security devices such as closed circuit television systems, audio monitors , and satellite tracking systems to monitor employees. They can also utilise sophisticated software systems that enable them to monitor their employees keyboard use, read their employees e- mails , and determine which Web sites their employees have visited. Telephone calls can be monitored , and information gleaned from these can be subject to sophisticated analysis. For example, a device called the Truth Phone can be used, which analyses voice stress during telephone calls in an effort to detect lying (Davies, 2003).

Perhaps the most unusual electronic surveillance system is the Hygiene Guard, which has been used on kitchen staff at the Tropicana Casino in Atlantic City and in a few other workplaces. [ 1] This is an electronic surveillance system that is designed to monitor hand washing in a workplace bathroom. Employees being monitored by the Hygiene Guard wear a Smart Badge on their shirt or blouse. The Smart Badge communicates with sensors in the bathroom to determine whether or not an employee has used a soap dispenser , and whether or not the employee has spent a required period of time standing in front of a sink with water running (O Harrow, 1997).

A recent survey conducted by the American Management Association found that 73 percent of all American companies engaged in some form of electronic surveillance of their employees. This percentage was a significant increase from the 1997 rate of electronic surveillance amongst American companies, which was an already high 63 percent (Blackwell, 2003). [ 2] In many cases, employees who are now subject to electronic monitoring have been accustomed to being able to make phone calls without being monitored, send e-mails without them being read by their workplace supervisor, and use the workplace bathroom without their bathroom habits being known to their employers. [ 3] If the rate of introduction of electronic surveillance into the workplace continues as it has over the last few years, then the few remaining workplaces that are not subject to electronic monitoring will come to be perceived as relics of a bygone era. Academic commentators who have discussed ethical issues raised by workplace surveillance have tended to focus on the issue of privacy. [ 4] In this chapter, I will take a different approach, concentrating on the issue of consent to electronic monitoring in the workplace. We return to consider the issue of workplace privacy, as well as the issue of workplace autonomy, having acquired a distinctive vantage point provided by a discussion of consent framed through the lens of the doctrine of informed consent. The discussion that follows is concerned with employee-employer relations in the private sectors of capitalist economies, and not with other possible forms of employee-employer relations in the public sector of capitalist economies or in non-capitalist economies.

[ 1] I will use the terms monitoring and surveillance more or less interchangeably. I acknowledge , however, that the term surveillance may seem to suggest a subcategory of monitoring, namely continuous monitoring.

[ 2] The survey covered monitoring of e-mail, voicemail messages, Internet and telephone usage, listening to employees conversations, and videotaping employees at work (Davies, 2003).

[ 3] Employees sometimes complain that they find electronic monitoring humiliating or degrading; issues of the precise phenomenology of the experience of being monitored are beyond the scope of this chapter.

[ 4] Recent discussions include Marx (1998), Miller and Weckert (2000), and Lyon (2001).




Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace. Controversies and Solutions
Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions
ISBN: 1591404568
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 161

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