resent this monitoring, if it is in the open. “I don’t think people mind having their work checked,” says Morton Bahr, president of the Communications Workers of America. “It’s the secretive- ness of it” that bothers employees.39
According to the American Management Association, three-quarters of employers record employees’ voice mail, e-mail, or phone calls; review their computer files; or even videotape them—often without their knowledge.40 In 2006 an Ohio firm took things a step further when it embedded RDIF (radio frequency identification) chips in the arms of two employees to help control access to secured areas—the first known case of a company’s electronically tagging workers.41 Tightening security and overseeing customer service are not the only reasons companies monitor their employees. Some companies, for example, check employees’ computers to see whether they exceed the allotted time for lunch or work breaks; others listen in on phone conversations and examine e-mail messages to catch employees conducting personal business on company time.
“What are they going to think up to do to us next?” wonders one employee. “It’s scary. I’ll bet no one monitors the phones or e-mail of CEOs and other top executives.”42 Nancy Flynn, executive director of ePolicy Institute, agrees with that sentiment. “In a lot of organizations,” she says, “the senior executives are immune from [electronic] monitoring.”43 If so, this raises a basic moral objec- tion. As explained in Chapter 1 and again in Chapter 2’s discussion of Kant, if we make a moral judgment, we must be willing to make the same judgment in any similar set of circumstances. These executives, however, are apparently willing to apply to others a policy that they are unwilling to see applied to themselves.
When in-house theft, sabotage, or other threatening conduct occurs, or- ganizations frequently install monitoring devices—mirrors, cameras, and elec- tronic recorders—to apprehend the employees who are responsible. But monitoring suspected trouble spots or private acts can create moral problems. Consider the two male employees of Boston Sheraton Hotel who were secretly videotaped changing clothes in the locker room during a hunt for a drug dealer. They weren’t suspects, just bystanders.44
Like personality and polygraph tests, monitoring of employees often gathers personal information about them without their informed consent. Organizations frequently confuse notification of such practices with employee consent, but notification does not constitute consent. When employee rest- rooms, dressing rooms, locker rooms, and other private places are bugged, an obvious and serious threat to privacy exists—posted notices notwithstand- ing. It’s true that in some cases surveillance devices may be the only way to apprehend the guilty. Nevertheless, they often can do more harm than good by violating the privacy of the vast majority of innocent employees. Obvi- ously, even more serious moral questions arise when monitoring devices are used not exclusively for the purposes intended but also for cajoling, haras- sing, or snooping on employees (sometimes with the goal of thwarting them from organizing unions45).