Friday, May 23, 1997

Here's looking at you: surveillance common in workplaces

By MAGGIE JACKSON / Associated Press

Feel like the boss is watching your every move? You might be right.

Nearly two-thirds of employers record employee voicemail, e-mail or phone calls, review computer files or videotape workers, the American Management Association said Thursday as it released a survey that provides the most substantive look yet at the prevalence of employer spying.

Moreover, the AMA said, up to a quarter of companies that spy don't tell their employees.

In almost all cases, it's perfectly legal. Short of serious intrusions such as videotaping the bathroom stalls, little prevents employers from secretly recording and reviewing almost anything a worker does.

"Employees are generally at the mercy of employers," says Robert Ellis Smith, publisher of the Privacy Journal, an independent monthly. "There is no protection in the workplace."

Surveillance raises age-old privacy issues: How much does a boss have to know about workers to run the store? Yet in the computer age, the balancing act becomes even harder, because employers have easy and powerful ways to keep tabs on the help.

Gail Nelson, a Massachusetts secretary, was stunned when a colleague discovered a video camera in late 1995 in their office at Salem State College's Small Business Development Center.

Nelson said she was told the camera was installed to watch for nighttime intruders. Yet the camera filmed 24 hours a day - including the after-hours occasions when Nelson went behind a divider to change into exercise clothes before walking home.

"They may have installed the camera for security reasons," she said in an interview. "But I can't see why they didn't tell me."

A union complaint filed on her behalf is to be heard by the Massachusetts Labor Relations Committee in June. If the matter isn't settled, she will sue the college for invasion of privacy.

A spokeswoman for the college, Betty van Iersel, reiterated that the camera was set up to catch a suspected night intruder. She said she didn't know why employees weren't told or why the camera filmed during the day.

The only federal law that limits employer surveillance currently comes from the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which bans employer eavesdropping on spoken personal conversations. Companies, however, can listen to business phone calls and monitor all non-spoken personal communications.

Connecticut is the only state to have additional safeguards, forbidding electronic monitoring in areas, such as bathrooms, designated for the health or personal comfort of employees.

Still, Nelson's lawyer Jeffrey Feuer says he'll contend in court that the Salem State videotaping - in secret and 24 hours a day - is too serious to permit. "Employers are not a country unto themselves," he said.

Few companies watch all employees all the time, the AMA and Employment Testing magazine said in its survey of 900 midsize and large member companies. Companies most often monitor selected workers, using routine spot checks.

Still, the survey's findings - that 63 percent of companies use some surveillance or monitoring, and up to 23 percent of companies don't tell workers - surprised both the survey's authors and civil rights advocates.

The most common forms of surveillance are: the tallying of phone numbers called and duration of calls (by nearly 37 percent of companies); videotaping of employees' work (nearly 16 percent); storing and reviewing of e-mail (15 percent); and storing and reviewing computer files (nearly 14 percent).

DuPont looks into phone or e-mail records only if a problem is suspected, said spokeswoman Becky Hamlin. But the company routinely monitors the heaviest Internet users to see if inappropriate sites are visited.

"If we see 40,000 hits to the Playboy channel, we would go in and backtrack and find out the computer and time used," she said.

Bankers and brokers are watched most often, mostly due to strict industry rules, said the survey. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Monitoring "can work to the customer's benefit," said Eric Rolfe Greenberg, who directed the study for the AMA, a prominent non-profit management training group. "Supervisors are checking to see that policies are being followed and laws and regulations obeyed."

They're also checking because companies can be held liable for racist or sexist e-mails that circulate. In 1995, Chevron Corp. settled a suit brought by four female employees who charged they were sexually harassed through e-mail, among other means. The women settled for $2.2 million, plus legal fees and court costs. Chevron denied the charges of sexual harassment.

Privacy advocates agree some watching is warranted but criticize the lack of national guidelines for surveillance. They say employees should always be told.

It's a matter of respect, says Francklin Etienne, who is suing the Sheraton Boston hotel for secretly videotaping the men's dressing room to ferret out possible drug dealing - an action the hotel calls responsible and lawful.

"Every day now when I go to work and when I go to the bathroom, I look for wires," says the room service waiter. "The bosses need to respect you. You don't belong to them. You're not their property."