Employee Autonomy & Privacy in the Workplace

Should There Be New Legislation to Protect Employee Autonomy and Privacy? By Greg Rehmke               Back to NCPA Debate Home Page

With many public policy issues it is helpful to ask "who owns it?" Private ownership of property and equipment is what distinguishes free-market economies from socialist economies. With questions about autonomy in the workplace, we can ask this question. Who owns the workplace? Who owns the office equipment, the computer, the modem or Local Area Network and internet connection? Because these are usually owned by the company, and because employees have agreed voluntarily to work at particular companies, people naturally have less autonomy than they they would at home or at a shopping center. Where workers should have complete autonomy is in their minds. A company should never be able to push into a employees mind to try to instill "politically correct" thinking. Yet this is just what many companies are doing with the "sensitivity" or "multicultural" workshops they mandate their employees attend. (These workshops are also popular on college campuses as part of freshmen orientation.) (For details on these abuses of privacy see follow links from this link to full article by Alan Kors (Kors is a professor and noted scholar at the University of Pennsylvania): For general concerns about autonomy in the workplace I offer two brief comments. First, much of the increased surveillance of workers by their employers is due to fear of lawsuits. Recent court decisions have let to companies being liable when there is harassment of women (or men) or minorities in the workplace. The courts have decided that even if management did not know of harassment taking place the company somehow contributes to the "atmosphere" that allowed it. So companies can be sued and have been. Companies respond not only by forcing employees into sensitivity training workshops (which their lawyers can point to when defending against harassment lawsuits in court), but also by monitoring all email and web surfing and hard drive content for potentially offensive materials. Second, it is worth noting that employees sometimes abuse their autonomy. Though it is hard for employees to pass unobserved reading the newspaper at their desk or play solitary with cards, logging onto the New York Times website, or playing solitary in Windows is easy to do and harder to spot. Though we often hear that Americans are working longer hours than they used to, it turns out that they are only in the workplace for longer hours. The actual time spent working for the company that employs them continues to decline. People spend more of this extra time at "work" writing personal email, checking their stock portfolio and chatting with friend by phone or ICQ. So it is not unreasonable for companies to try to find ways to keep new technologies like computers, the Internet and email focused on the tasks they hire people to do.