Electronic Surveillance In The Workplace

Workplace and Employees’s Electronic Surveillance
And Their Efects in Employee Privacy

German A. Ramirez
Strayer University
Sand Lake Campus– Orlando Fl
Proffessor: Patrick Halnon
April 30, 2011



Abstraction

At the following document, we can analyze problems and benefits that are placing surveillance devices in the workplace, what intentions may have the employers on how to usethem? How the Employees feel when they realize that they are being watched at all times and incertain cases to hear that have been watched and they did not know it? The employers legal position in front of it and the employees legal position, is this violating the employees privacy?



1. Explain where an employee can reasonably expect to have privacy in the workplace.
The employee canthink and spect that when he or she is in the work area, be this only a desktop without any kind of division, this must give him some kind of privacy regard to this case between he and his client about the business is performing, it is clear that in an open area that allows be reached by anyone without the intention to be monitored or listened.
"There is no general federal or state law creatingor protecting a zone of privacy in the workplace" wrote George Webster in Association Management. "The U.S. Constitution's First Amendment free-speech clause and the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures apply only to action by the government, not to private-sector employers…. By and large, employees leave their constitutional rights at the workplace door”.Employees seeking to redress an invasion of their privacy by electronic monitoring in the workplace utilize the tort of intrusion on seclusion. Most jurisdictions recognize that the right of privacy may be invaded by four distinct invasions of privacy torts: unreasonable intrusion on the seclusion of another; appropriation of the other’s name or likeness; unreasonable publicity given to the other’sprivate life; or publicity that unreasonably places the other in a false light before the public. See Restatement (Second) of Torts 652A (1977). Most jurisdictions follow Dean Prosser’s description of intrusion on seclusion as written in the Restatement:
One, who intentionally intrudes, physically or otherwise, upon the solitude or seclusion of another or his private affairs or concerns, is subject toliability to the other for invasion of his privacy, if the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person.
Intrusion on seclusion is the type of invasion of privacy tort claim that is the most applicable for plaintiffs seeking to challenge employer monitoring and surveillance in the workplace, as it is associated with either: a physical intrusion into a place in which the plaintiffhas secluded herself; the use of the defendant’s senses, with or without mechanical aids, (e.g., wiretaps, microphones, or just plain spying,) to oversee or overhear the plaintiff’s private affairs; or some other form of investigation or examination into the plaintiff’s private concerns, as by opening her private and personal mail. See Restatement (Second) of Torts 652B cmt. b (1977); ElizabethWilborn, Revisiting the Public/Private Distinction: Employee Monitoring in the Workplace, 32 Ga. L. Rev. 825, 844 (Spring 1998).

2. In the office workplace there are typically two types of workspaces, an open area, in which there are several desks and where conversations can be overhead, or an enclosed office, in which—when the door is closed—conversations cannot be heard and where one wouldexpect virtually total privacy. Explain whether it makes a difference if an employee is in an open area or in an enclosed office.
The difference arises because when the employee is in an open space, and this has an individual workspace, no longer in the public domain, anyone, whether the same supervisor, manager, other employees, other people , to the person who cleans the place, they can see...