Rlc... Holy Crap!!!

**KukriKhan** · 07-31-2007, 03:41

So, is the question to the Backroom: can knowledge of personal activity gained by workplace monitoring ethical, and actionable?

Or something else?

What is Rlc?

p.s. if it were my company, the first guy fired would be IT guy for caving in to fellow employees over lunch.

**Whacker** · 07-31-2007, 03:53

So, is the question to the Backroom: can knowledge of personal activity gained by workplace monitoring ethical, and actionable?

Ermm.. What exactly is the question again?

I'll take a swag at it though. On one hand we have the employer, who should have a reasonable expectation that when they are paying someone for their time to do work, then they should actually be working (most of the time). On the other hand, we have the employee, who should have a right to some levels of privacy and an expectation that his employer is not always looking over his shoulder and allowing him to do his job like a big boy. "On the clock" is a grey term that's highly debateable in my view, esp. for salaried office-type positions.

I guess my thought is that stuff like this, monitoring usage of resources to this level, is probably going a bit too far. If an employee is suspected of slacking off at work, then it'll show up in his results when the performance reviews come around. There are established HR processes for dealing with occurances like this. Now that's just thinking about random browsing of sites on a PC (even porn maybe), and stuff like using the company phone excessively for personal long distance.

The sticky areas that we've had to deal with are things like sexual harassment (female coworker walks in on male coworker looking a gianthooters.com, etc), and stalking/harassment/death threats and the like. My personal feeling is that the employer should not be accountable for the employee doing things like this at all, but I don't know what the law really states on this matter and how much if at all the employer could be held accountable.

Also, another thought I had. Even IF the employer has been monitoring BBB's computer usage, I don't believe they can even ask him anything about what he's been doing except to establish that he HAS be visiting the site, which I'm guessing is in direct violation of company/HR policy, business conduct guidelines, and/or his employment contract.