Employer as Little Brother

Employer as Little Brother

TEC/401

Introduction

The term “Big Brother” is watching you refer to how the Federal Government can monitor your every move, if desired. From the amount you money you earn and how much you pay in taxes to who you are talking to and when on your telephone or cell phone. Now there is a new term beginning to common place, “Little Brother is watching you”. This term refers to how an employer can monitor your actions on the job in an office environment due to the technology now available to the employer to monitor and read what you are doing on the company computer. And it is ironic that one such technology is a computer software program released in 1998 to monitor what the employee is doing on the company computer is actually called “LittleBrother”.

LittleBrother

Created by the company “SurfControl”, it uses a data base that has recorded over 45,000 internet web-sites that have been placed in the categories of productive, neutral or unproductive and has the capability to inform an employer if his/her employee’s are working under those categories while on the job. This also includes the ability to read an employee’s e-mails, sent and received, regardless

of whether they have been deleted or not by the employee. And this is not a technological capability that companies are not seeking. As reported from a survey conducted by the Society of Human Resource Management in 1996. “36 percent of responding companies searched employee messages regularly and 70 percent said employers should reserve the right to do so.” (Miriam Schulman)

Why Would Companies Monitor Employee Computer Activity?

Companies have a legitimate right to expect, and demand, the most value for the money they are expending and actually have to. So they can keep operating costs down and quality high to be competitive and to attract and retain a customer base. So if employees are using the company computer to surf the web for recipes on Epicurious.com or to view x-rated sites. The company is losing money in lost productivity of the employee and having to pass the costs of that lost productivity to the consumer.

Another problem for companies is the loss of proprietary information to a competitor. There was an instance where an employee of the company Cadence Systems was caught, through company computer monitoring, of sending 5 million bytes of information to a personal e-mail account. Cadence being a software development company could only suspect the employee was going to hand over proprietary information to its software development rival Avant because the employee had given notice that he was leaving the company to Avant.

Also, employers have to be concerned about the atmosphere of the workplace and how it can be affected through the use of its computers. If employees are using the companies computer system to transmit racist and/or sexist e-mail messages or jokes. This can be considered a hostile work environment by employees offended by those messages and jokes causing the company to become liable and having to pay fines and/or compensation to the affected employees. Which happened in a case brought by employees to court against the financial institution Morgan Stanley, which defeated the suit but still had to pay lawyers to defend it?

The Employee View

Yet, when a person becomes an employee for a company, that company cannot expect the employee to give up all of his or her rights to a reasonable expectation of privacy and freedom. In the majority of situations, the employee wants to be productive for a company with the expectations of having a career challenge, chance for advancements and for rewards whether monetary or intrinsic. Also, the employee does not consider the use of the company computer to search for dinner recipes or to correspond to friends via e-mail to