Careful--the Cubicles Have Ears

Ever wonder if your bosses are using technology to spy on you? A groundbreaking survey suggests that electronic surveillance is increasingly entrenched in the American workplace--and in many cases, employers are doing the snooping without ever letting you know.

The poll, which covered 906 big and medium-sized U.S. employers, found that 35.3% at least occasionally conduct one or more kinds of electronic surveillance of their workers. The activities include listening to employees’ phone calls or voicemail messages, reading electronic mail or computer files and videotaping the way workers perform their jobs.

What’s more, even though companies often can fend off invasion-of-privacy lawsuits by alerting employees in advance, nearly one out of six of the snooping employers said they don’t warn their workers about surveillance.

If workers “think that their e-mail is private, they better think again. If they think their phone conversations are private, they better think again,” said Rosemary Orthmann, editor of Employment Testing: Law and Policy Reporter, a newsletter that teamed up with the nonprofit American Management Assn. to conduct the survey.

Privacy advocates and management lawyers alike agreed that there are legitimate uses for electronic surveillance in the workplace. Still, some advocates regarded the survey--probably the broadest U.S. poll ever taken on workplace surveillance--as fresh evidence that legislation is needed to expand the generally narrow privacy protections provided to employees under state and federal law.

Electronic surveillance “is no longer an occasional occurrence. It’s become standard operating procedure in many companies,” said Lewis Maltby, director of the workplace rights office of the American Civil Liberties Union.

But Lawrence Fineran, a spokesman for the National Assn. of Manufacturers, countered that companies sometimes need to conduct workplace surveillance because they are legally responsible for their employees’ actions.

For example, he said, banks may need to check on their loan officers to make sure they aren’t defrauding clients or committing other violations that could prove enormously costly. Or companies might want to snoop on employees suspected of discriminating against or harassing co-workers or customers.

For instance, a division of Chevron Corp. settled for $2.2 million a 1995 sexual harassment case brought by four female employees who alleged they were the targets of, among other things, abusive e-mail.

Largely for those reasons, an informal coalition of employers that Fineran guided in the late 1980s and early ‘90s throttled a proposed federal Privacy for Consumers and Workers Act that would have expanded workplace privacy protections.

“I know some anecdotes are out there of stupid middle managers who have been overbearing in their use of electronic surveillance,” Fineran said, but most employers that conduct electronic monitoring “are doing it to ensure quality customer service, to meet fiduciary and legal responsibilities and for general performance evaluation.”

Examples of possible abuses abound, however. Five current or former workers at a Sheraton hotel in Boston are suing the company for secretly videotaping them and other workers in the male employees’ locker room over a seven-week period in 1991. The workers say they were humiliated after discovering that some of them were captured on videotape in their underwear.

Such videotaping “represents an attempt by employers to control every aspect of workers’ lives while they’re on the job, and that includes when they’re changing their clothes or taking breaks,” said Jeffrey M. Feuer, a lawyer for the workers, whose case is pending in Massachusetts state court.

Representatives of parent company ITT Sheraton Corp. declined to be interviewed. But the company has argued in court that the videotaping was intended to investigate suspicions of drug dealing, and that one “apparent drug transaction” was spotted.

The employers responding to the poll, taken earlier this year, are all members of the American Management Assn., a leading New York-based research organization whose members are large and mid-size employers. As such, the group is not a random sampling of U.S. employers, but the poll nevertheless may be the most reliable gauge available of the extent to which employers are using any of the leading forms of electronic surveillance.

A previous survey, a poll of 301 businesses by Macworld magazine in 1993, found that 22% had engaged in searches of voice or electronic mail or computer files. Unlike the survey released Thursday, however, the 1993 poll did not take into account videotaping of employees.

The new survey took care to determine how many employers are snooping into what workers are saying or writing on the job, as opposed to simply tracking all kinds of electronic monitoring, including some that are less intrusive. In fact, the poll found that if any kind of electronic monitoring is included, the share of employers engaging in one or more of the activities is a much higher 63.4%.

Still, new types of electronic surveillance are emerging that were not included in the survey. For instance, some employers require workers to wear location badges that indicate where they are at all times while they are on the job.

Times staff writer Karen Kaplan contributed to this report.

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On-the-Job Surveillance

A survey of 906 employers found that 35.3% occasionally conduct one or more types of electronic surveillance on their workers. When other, less invasive, kinds of electronic monitoring are taken into account, the percentage rises to 63.4%.

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Percentage of firms Surveillance activity that use it occasionally Tape employee phone conversations 10.4% Review voice mail 5.2 Review electronic mail 14.9 Videotape employee performance 15.7 Videotape work areas to 34.0 counter theft, violence or sabotage but not to monitor job performance Keep records of phone numbers 37.4 called and the duration of the calls

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Note: Among employers conducting employee surveillance, 15.9% say that in some cases they do not inform employees.

Sources: American Management Assn.; Employment Testing: Law & Policy Reporter