Big Brother at work

Big Brother at workEver wondered what it would have been like to share the Big Brother house with reality TV's new batch of hopefuls? Well, you may be closer than you think…




Hi-tech gadgetry and sophisticated surveillance techniques in the workplace make all of us vulnerable. Sure, most of us would agree that some things are totally unacceptable - if your colleague gets sacked for downloading and mailing hardcore porn or racist material, you're unlikely to feel too much sympathy. But in the majority of cases, it's pretty innocent behaviour that gets caught. Like me, you may have suffered the shame of being told off for over-enthusiastic visits to your favourite shopping website during your lunch break (OK, or at any other time during the day) or for placing just one too many desperate calls to the Who Wants to be a Millionaire competition line over the office phone.

But can our bosses rap our knuckles for doing this - and what rights do we have to stop them? Doesn't the law provide a balance between your employer's right to know what's going on and your own right to privacy? Sadly, that's always been a delicate question, and it looks like the conflict may go head to head over the next few months.

Like many of us, you may have thought the Human Rights Act would improve your freedom in the workplace - but then, if you've read about the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (or 'RIP': scary name, scary piece of law), you may decide Big Brother has won the fight before it even began. These two conflicting bits of legislation may affect your life at work.

Email/Internet monitoring
A whole host of computer programs allow employers to search for keywords in emails, read your correspondence and register the Internet sites you visit. Again, your boss will come up with a range of reasons why monitoring is necessary, like security, protection of the company's image etc etc. But in practice, it still feels like you're being spied on.

Before the RIP code, employers were generally pretty careful to monitor emails only where they believed both the sender and the recipient were aware of the possibility that their correspondence wasn't private. But now your company can check your email without consent for various purposes, like recording evidence of business transactions; monitoring standards of training and service or preventing unauthorised use of the computer system.

All sounds quite innocent - but in practice, it covers a multitude of sins. You can sympathise with firms who have ended up paying out millions for racist or sexist emails they have no idea their staff are circulating. (In America, oil firm Chevron stumped up $2.2 million when lawyers looking for dirt in a sexual harassment claim dug up a couple of slightly risque emails.) But again, surely it's possible to put some system in place to monitor dodgy messages like that without trawling through all your personal email?

Though the answer may be yes in theory, in practice employers may want to review all messages at will. In America, over half of all corporate email systems are monitored, and that trend is already on the increase in the UK.

CCTV
The use of CCTV in the workplace isn't currently regulated under UK law, although the government has published a voluntary code of practice. This contains various helpful bits of advice. It asks employers to:

  • position cameras so that they only capture relevant images
  • put up signs to say that CCTV is in use UNLESS the cameras are there to identify criminal activity and such signs would warn any likely offenders
  • ensure that they don't record conversations between employees
  • retain data for 28 days and then wipe clean and reuse the tape
  • allow employees to see the recorded images.So far, so good. But unfortunately the code is voluntary and there's nothing much you can do to make your employer follow it. All in all, not very encouraging. If you're caught on camera, realistically your only other option is to argue that in filming you, your employer has damaged your faith in the employment relationship - and you could resign and sue. If you win your case, you could come out of this pretty well in financial terms. But it's still a pretty dramatic response to have to make.

    Phone-tapping
    Lots of employers routinely tap telephones. They argue it helps to assess employee performance, ensure customer satisfaction and record evidence of business transactions. Again, a blatant breach of what most believe is a right to privacy at work. Your boss could be listening in to details of what your boyfriend's going to be cooking for your supper, or discovering just how irate your bank manager is about your overdraft. Surely, this time, there's something you can do about it? Sorry - the RIP code allows your employer to tap your phone, on the same grounds that emails can be monitored.

    Human Rights Act
    So, is the Human Rights Act going to help in the fight against RIP and Big Brother? On the face of it, the Act gives you a number of rights - including respect for your private and family life, your home and your correspondence. Sounds good - the monitoring of phone calls, emails and the use of CCTV all potentially breach these freedoms. But the Act only applies directly to public employers - and even here, there are a number of defences. If your employer:

  • sets out the manner in which it expects its email, Internet and telephones to be used;
  • informs staff that they may be monitored in certain circumstances; and
  • the monitoring is done on a reasonable levelthe chances are none of the above will be breaching your human rights.

    So, Big Brother is most definitely out there. Do you play him at his own game, or do you stick your neck out and risk getting the boot? The safe advice must be to use your company phone and computer reasonably - employers will rarely dismiss on the basis of only moderate personal use of their equipment. Your employer should be making it quite clear to you what is and what isn't acceptable use of its systems ? if it doesn't, chances are any action it takes against you won't be lawful.

    It's definitely true to say that companies are worried about the effect of heavy-handed monitoring on staff morale. But, like me, you may still find it deeply disturbing that they're monitoring everything you do - and that they can get away with it.