I know everyone is going to shoot this idea down with a million reasons why, but even so:
why are these laws never symmetric?
Why can't employees also access things possessed and used by the employer, like, say, HR personnel files, or executive emails, so that employees can verify the company is not committing fraud, engaging in discriminatory practices, etc.?
There's such an emphasis on what the company has a right to do to protect itself that we almost don't even think about how company actions, which could be damaging to and unapproved by the employee, go on unchecked all the time.
I assume the answer is just "might makes right" and the employer is the one with capital available for legal and political manipulation. But what's so surprising to me is that we rarely even talk about it even in an era with so much overt and publicly hated corporate corruption.
This is actually an interesting question, IMO. But, I think you can quickly see the situation is not inherently symmetric, so the answer can't be either.
Just one example - giving employees open access to company materials affects the privacy rights of other people, not just the company. So in order to protect the privacy rights you do have vs the company, they will have to restrict other people's access to your information.
The title of this article is misleading in the sense that the decision was that companies may inspect employees' PMs that originate from company computers. They did not make a blanket decision that the company may monitor personal phones or personal computers.
That highlights how the situation is not symmetric in the sense that you haven't loaned your computers to the company in order to produce their personnel files.
I agree with you that it wouldn't be perfectly symmetric and a number of difficult follow-on issues would arise.
But, I see a lot of emphasis being placed on the fact that it was a company-owned machine and that it was ostensibly being used for company purposes. These two facts seem to underpin a lot of what everyone says.
But ownership and mode of use are not the only kinds of resources or properties to think of. For example, at least in the US we have the concept of "company time" which covers the time periods during which you are performing an action sanctioned by a company. Could this be used to demand the ability to monitor employees during time periods when they are on company time?
Likewise, there are a lot of gray areas going in the reverse direction -- from employee to employer. For example, it is true that HR records (say, for example, performance reviews written by my boss about solely me) are electronic files that are the property of the company, just like a computer workstation is property of the company.
But, just as a computer workstation could be misused for personal use, and thus needs to be inspectable for compliance, so also the HR files could be misused for personal use (making jokes, talking about non-professional aspects of me, conspiring to deny a promotion simply due to personal preference, etc.) -- so why aren't such files open for inspection?
Yet another interesting aspect of all of this is why we believe that not only must the workstation be made available for inspection, but further that it is the employer who gets to perform the inspection.
Why isn't such inspection required to be handled by a third-party arbiter, much the way that tax and official records are required to be kept by a certified firm specializing in it. We don't trust companies to say, "Yep, these are my taxes and records, I swear I didn't lie or hide any money." We at least require some third-party to attest to that and stake a reputation on it (subverted though it may be).
Yet with issues of inspection, we just sort of capitulate to this idea that the employer not only gets to raise the issue of suspicion about misuse, but also gets to be the authority on the investigation of whether or not misuse occurred, and to what extent employee privacy must be invaded to get all the relevant info.
For better or worse, companies do generally have the right to monitor you when you're on company time. All companies that I have personal experience with, large and small, recognize that doing so aggressively may lead to lower morale, employee mistrust, or lower productivity. So, they choose how they monitor carefully.
Your primary agreement with the company is a trade of your time and skills in return for money, and the symmetric right you have is that you definitely do have the right to monitor and verify that you've been given the proper amount of money.
> HR files could be misused [...] so why aren't such files open for inspection?
In some places, they are open for inspection. There are laws in at least some US states that the company must show you your own personnel file, if you request it.
> Your primary agreement with the company is a trade of your time and skills in return for money
Not really. The tradeoff is not just for money but for a spectrum of compensation, which could be equity (which could confer voting or board rights to you to monitor certain things about the company financial health), vacation time, conference attendance, foosball table access, etc.
Often these things are negotiable, at least if the employer values talent. So why couldn't we negotiate that part of compensation is some sort of verifiable transparency and mutual respect in terms of monitoring the appropriateness of company activities (whether on behalf of the employer or employee)?
I don't see any fundamental reason why these couldn't be negotiated as part of an employment agreement. Instead, what I see is that most employees either don't know or don't care about these items, and, more importantly, that employers actively collude and engage in e.g. regulatory capture specifically to deny workers the opportunity to be able to negotiate these things.
> The tradeoff [...] could be equity (which could confer voting or board rights to you to monitor certain things about the company financial health)
If you have that, then you have significantly elevated access to the information you were talking about, and you're already landing on the side of protecting the company. The issues you raised don't really apply here.
> [...] vacation time, conference attendance, foosball table access, etc.
If you value those on par with your salary, then I have a job for you! ;)
> I don't see any fundamental reason why these couldn't be negotiated as part of an employment agreement.
You're right, there is no reason. You can and should negotiate these things. Negotiate away!
Just recognize that you may have multiple conflicting interests within yourself. If you want access to confidential company information about others, you're implicitly requesting that they have access to confidential information about you. Most of us wouldn't mind knowing everyone else's salary, and most of us don't want others to know ours. Most of us would love access to the personnel reviews of our co-workers, and most of us would be mortified to let them read ours.
I think there is some valid discusion to be had re:
Who gave them the right and should we continue to recognize that right?
The issue of symmetries of power brings into call the granting and enforcing of rights at a very basic level. If rights are not endowed in a symmetric fashion, shouldn't we step the conversation back and talk about that instead of throwing our collective hands up and agreeing to participate in perpetuating institutionaled inequality?
Allow me to be devils advocate here. I'm the all powerful Admin. Whether or not you're on company time isn't the boundary here, it's the network. If you're on my network, I have the right to inspect your traffic and/or restrict access. Not just the right, it's part of my job responsibilities.
While I don't agree with these policies on a personal level, I've seen enough to understand it's usefulness in certain environments.
To avoid these kinds of things, always use your own device on your own internet for all things outside of work. Then you only have to worry about the upstream snooping your data.
Notice that I never challenged the result of the ruling -- I actually think it's totally fine to give employers the right to inspect equipment they own and I pedantically follow the advice you suggest by absolutely never logging into any personal account or generating any non-work-related web traffic on any work-owned devices. I want to personally ensure that if an employer ever does see fit to inspect my workstation, it will just be super boring for them. I try my best to extend this to my work emailing habits too, by trying to write the shortest possible emails, and trying to respond to people with in-person responses when possible, to avoid proliferating paper trails of my own conversations.
The only thing I am saying is that this is a two-way street. If employers are allowed to investigate networks because of some socially constructed and arbitrary property (e.g. it is "work-related") then why aren't employees allowed to do the same thing, or to ensure that a certified third-party arbiter can do so on their behalf.
My issue is not that employers can see what employees do on employer-owned property. My issue is that employees should also be able to see what employers do, to verify that they are acting in the best interest of the employee in situations where an employee has a right to expect that. If it is "the company" that owns these things, machines, HR files, etc., then why does only one 'class' of corporate citizen get to have the access (the executive class, generally administered through a layer of HR/legal/compliance officers) while huge other classes of corporate citizens, regular workers, who are just as much "the company" as anyone else is, are never allowed symmetric access to make sure of the issues that could affect them.
Saying that "the company" owns things is not helpful, because if we're all equally "the company" then we all have our professional lives riding on adherence to company policy, verifiably not committing fraud, and so forth. Yet courts consistently side with the ruling classes within a company and clearly support the idea that employees do not get to have such access.
The other point I raised is that, even granting the company has the right to investigate what transpired on its owned equipment, why does that mean that the company itself gets to be the entity that performs the inspection? If we wanted to (a) determine whether or not a worker inappropriately used company property and also (b) protect that workers privacy, at least as far as it is related to the employer, then we should be willing to let a neutral third-party arbiter perform the investigation and agree in advance to be bound by its decision.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's much more complicated than "Company owns the machine. Company can do what they want." No. They can do what we determine it is right for them to do. Maybe that is doing X but not Y if we value protecting Y. We can make these laws or make them part of negotiated employment agreements, but rather than doing so, we allow ourselves to be asymmetrically treated as a lower class within the organization, and we rationalize reasons post facto for why this should be so.
'Just one example - giving employees open access to company materials affects the privacy rights of other people, not just the company. So in order to protect the privacy rights you do have vs the company, they will have to restrict other people's access to your information."
I'm not sure this is a good example. Bear in mind that 'the company' is just other employees. I am not aware of any particular set of 'rights' limiting which employees have access to your information - just policy which is entirely decided by the power hierarchy.
In Europe, you do have the right to request any files that HR/personnel hold on you. (In the UK, it's called a data subject request). I've certainly seen it used multiple times as part of the recruitment process, where an unsuccessful candidate has requested the notes made on them.
The entire employment system veers towards these biases. It's shown even in simple things like "you'll need to give us 10 minutes after you're supposed to be finished working this evening, but don't you dare consider taking 10 minutes off tomorrow".
Behavior like this (from the employer/manager) is only acceptable because we let it be acceptable.
I hear examples like this a lot but it simply hasn't been my experience, and I haven't always worked in developer-run (or even developer-friendly) industries or companies.
I 100% accept that I might just have been lucky in my previous and current employment, but any time I've had a doctor's appointment or had to run to the vet or anything like that, I've either made the time up that evening or the next day (one time for a long Wednesday AM appointment, over the next two days).
I say this not to discredit the very real fact that employers like this exist, but only to suggest that this is on the same level as poverty wages and forcing someone to buy their own office supplies. If you work in an environment like this, moving on (either simply by employment or geographically) should be among your top priorities.
In the Defence industry, they can and will search vehicles and property. Accepting a job is assumed (sometimes explicitly contractually stated as) giving consent. You must generally assume that company machines and comms means are monitored at all times.
Plenty of employers can and will search your belongings/vehicles you bring on their premises. Think the NSA or prison workers for example. Or even bank employees. Anyone who works in a secure facility (Think civilian employees who work on a military base) are subject to search as well.
Yes, if it is your car, they cannot search it. (Unless, as others said, it is a secured area, and by entering you give permission to search your person and property.)
But if you deliver for Papa John's, and they think you swiped some stuff, they can't search your cat.
Of course, law enforcement may acquire a search warrant, but that applies to everything, employer and employee.
I truly believe we've had a paradigm shift in how workers are viewed in this country. Even Paul Graham thinks if a labor union exists, there's opportunity for disruption in that industry.
People are commoditized and anything but a race to the bottom with employee wages and rights is an inefficiency.
As an employer, I understand that a labour union rises my costs and makes my business less flexible. As a humanist, I understand that a labour union is just about the only way workers can have their voice heard, and progress from wage slavery to somewhat bearable working conditions can be effected, and the corresponding backwards slide resisted. Those viewpoints are not contradictory.
They are, in a cooperative company, that is, in a company owned by their workers, it is symmetric and transparent.
In a company that is owned by someone else, obviously this someone else decide what is done in the company.
"Why can't employees also access things possessed and used by the employer, like, say, HR personnel files, or executive emails, so that employees can verify the company is not committing fraud, engaging in discriminatory practices, etc.?"
Some employees have access to such information on any company, but those employees are trusted by the owner.
Employees are not saints. If a design of a prototype is valued in millions of euros and they have access to it, they could have the temptation to sell it to the competition and become rich, or just compete with the original company with the info without having done the investments.
This is valid to anything that could be considered "trade secret" that if competition knows, could simply destroy your company. Information like geomineral prospective studies that took millions of dollars to make in the end is so simple like "here there are so many tons of gold or platinum". With this info in a phrase a competitor could save millions.
You can extract all the info you want about a company if you have access to their private communications.
This is really interesting as well, and I'm of the opinion at least a shred of 'corporate information' should be more widely shared among employees, specifically as it relates to company health, longevity and compensation programs.
There's only so much that can be learned from publicly available statements. So, when somebody might want to point out "Hey look our company has been profitable and growing at 3% for the past XX quarters so why are you not even giving small-fry employees a COLA raise?" it could be a reasonable discussion. I don't see that happening, as you say, based on the "might makes right" platform of ranking.
It's a pretty bad situation for employees in my opinion, and yet I don't think there's any established 'format' or 'platform' where such information is more widely shared or discussed in US workplaces.
Yeah I'm all for that labor arrangement but unfortunately it has not been even a remote possibility in my professional career in the US thus far. Maybe that will change in time. I hope so.
> which could be damaging to and unapproved by the employee
Because unless you work for some sort of co-op or a very specific subset of unionized labor, employees by definition do not have the right to approve anything
why are these laws never symmetric?
Why can't employees also access things possessed and used by the employer, like, say, HR personnel files, or executive emails, so that employees can verify the company is not committing fraud, engaging in discriminatory practices, etc.?
There's such an emphasis on what the company has a right to do to protect itself that we almost don't even think about how company actions, which could be damaging to and unapproved by the employee, go on unchecked all the time.
I assume the answer is just "might makes right" and the employer is the one with capital available for legal and political manipulation. But what's so surprising to me is that we rarely even talk about it even in an era with so much overt and publicly hated corporate corruption.