Imagine crossing a border each day into a world where officials can search your belongings, monitor your phone conversations, read your personal e-mail, secretly videotape your actions, subject you to physical and psychological testing--and you are powerless to stop them.
If that sounds like China or one of the former Eastern Bloc countries, think again. That border is the workplace door here in the United States. And those officials are employers, who routinely encroach on the privacy of workers in ways that police or the government wouldn't dare attempt without a search warrant.
Your boss doesn't want you to know it, but every day, you forfeit some privacy for the opportunity to earn a paycheck. Courts have determined time and again that El Jefe has the right to spy on you at work as long as there is business justification for doing so. In most cases, your only recourse, if you don't like it, is to quit.
"There's almost nothing an employer can't do, and there's not much employers aren't doing," said Lewis Maltby, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's national task force on civil liberties in the workplace. "You may live in America. But it's not the same America when you go to work."
Technological progress has only hastened the trend. Experts estimate that at least 26 million Americans are electronically monitored every workday. All the gee-whiz technology that has made American workers poster children for productivity can also function as an electronic tether. In this digital age, your boss may know how fast you type, what Web sites you visit, with whom you're exchanging electronic messages and more.
Fully two-thirds of big companies surveyed recently by the American Management Assn. said they engage in a host of surveillance techniques to track employee performance, productivity, wrongdoing or potential liability on the job. Those actions include listening to employees' phone calls and voicemail, reading their e-mail, rifling through their computer files and videotaping their activities. About 15% of those firms don't tell employees what they're doing. In many cases, they don't have to.
The U.S. Constitution protects citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures and other invasive activities by government. Private-sector companies aren't bound by the same restrictions.
