Law & Ethic

Law, Ethics, and Corporate Governance – LEG 500

1. Explain where an employee can reasonably expect to have privacy in the workplace.

The increased use of technology leads employers to improve ways to protect their company, secure their investments, and increase employee’s productivity. Therefore employee’s privacy within the workplace becomes very tight because it is not the primary focus of their employers today, more concerned by employee’s loyalty and productivity. However many employers include privacy policy in the employee handbook that outlines specifics in regard to Email and Electronic Surveillance ,this policy is legally binding. From a legal aspect “In some instances, courts have upheld employee privacy. Specifically, courts have sided with employee privacy in instances where the monitoring has been physically invasive, such as hidden cameras in a locker room or bathroom”. (Privacy rights clearinghouse, 2011)

So, employees can realistically presume to have privacy in the bathroom and locker room where any camera recording will be forbidden in a court of law; consequently, “Courts have recently held that it is an unreasonable invasion of privacy to monitor employees undressing, and such monitoring violates state and federal law”. (American Civil Liberty Union, 2011)

Delaware and Connecticut laws requiring employer to inform employee that monitoring of email or Internet usage is occurring in a “conspicuous manner”, but in most of the other states and at the federal level privacy laws prevailing are defined in the, Fourth amendments that are not to be violated by the government, which does not concerned the private sector; so they stated, “there is no constitutional protection against searches or surveillance by private protection”. (Halbert & Inguilli, 2011 p. 90)

They are also governed by the common law of torts. Halbert& Inguilli (2011) specified...