Privacy Rights and Unionizing

5/20/2020 Print Preview

https://ng.cengage.com/static/nb/ui/evo/index.html?eISBN=9781285872643&id=30222994&snapshotId=116383&dockAppUid=101&nbId=116383& 1/2

Chapter 13: Employees Rights and Discipline: 13.1 Employee Rights and Privacy Book Title: Managing Human Resources Printed By: Cedric Turner ([email protected]) © 2016 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

13.1 Employee Rights and Privacy Employee rights (Guarantees of fair treatment that become rights when they are granted to employees by the courts, legislatures, or employers) can be defined as the guarantees of fair treatment that workers expect in return for their services to an employer. These expectations become rights when they are granted to employees by the courts, legislatures, or employers. Over the course of the last 50 or so years, various antidiscrimination laws, wage and hour statutes, and safety and health legislation have secured basic employee rights and brought numerous job improvements to the workers in the United States. Included among those rights are the rights of employees to protest unfair disciplinary actions, to question genetic testing, to have access to their personal files, to challenge employer searches and monitoring, and to be largely free from employer discipline for off- duty conduct.

The evolution of employee rights is a natural result of the evolution of societal, business, and employee interests. We have already explained that workplace-privacy issues have received a great deal of attention lately. For example, employees may feel they have an expectation of privacy regarding their personal phone calls made from work phones, their e- mail messages sent from computers in the workplace, or freedom from employers’ random searches of their personal belongings. However, as attorney Benjamin J. Cook notes, “When employers clearly state that there is no expectation of privacy, it’s hard to argue that a reasonable person could have such an expectation.” Legal scholars recognize that the protection of employee privacy rights extends only so far; federal and state courts generally view the privacy rights of employees as minimal.

For example, consider the issue of camera surveillance. Generally it is legal to install cameras in the workplace (except for installations in bathrooms and locker rooms), as long as employees are informed about them. However, after pornography was discovered on one of its computers, a California children’s home for abused children installed hidden surveillance cameras in an office shared by two employees. The person who had accessed the pornography was never caught. However, the two employees who shared the office later discovered the camera and were upset they were being monitored. They claimed their privacy rights had been violated, but the Supreme Court of California ruled against them, saying that their employer had a legitimate business reason for conducting the surveillance.

Chapter 13: Employees Rights and Discipline: 13.1 Employee Rights and Privacy Book Title: Managing Human Resources Printed By: Cedric Turner ([email protected]) © 2016 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

5/20/2020 Print Preview

https://ng.cengage.com/static/nb/ui/evo/index.html?eISBN=9781285872643&id=30222994&snapshotId=116383&dockAppUid=101&nbId=116383& 2/2

© 2020 Cengage Learning Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this work may by reproduced or used in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic, or mechanical, or in any other manner - without the written permission of the copyright holder.