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ceo/cfo
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作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
CUBICLE CULTURE
By JARED SANDBERG
Monitoring of Workers
Is Boss's Right but Why
Not Include Top Brass?
May 18, 2005; Page B1
When the American Management Association and the consulting firm ePolicy Institute release their 2005 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey today, it will include this cheery little tidbit: 26% of the organizations surveyed fired workers for misusing the Internet. Another 25% have terminated employees for email abuse, and 6% have canned them for misusing office phones.
The survey doesn't show how many of those employees were members of the executive suite. But you can bet that not many executives were hoisted by their pinstriped petards.
"In a lot of organizations, the senior executives are immune from any [electronic] monitoring," says Nancy Flynn, executive director of ePolicy Institute. She also maintains that private-sector companies aren't doing enough to educate everyone from interns to the top brass about acceptable Internet usage. And, she says, they also haven't made it clear enough that at work "you have no reasonable expectation of privacy."
Although Americans working on U.S. soil enjoy a vast array of rights, those rights don't necessarily apply in the sovereign tyrannies better known as the workplace. That's the implicit sacrifice we make in exchange for our paychecks. Luckily most corporations are benevolent dictators. Still, there's plenty of room for abuse.
"You should take your passport when you go to work because all your rights as an American citizen disappear the second you walk through the office door," says Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a nonprofit organization that focuses on human rights. Employees "think they have the protection of the Bill of Rights; they think they have a right to free speech; they think they have a right to privacy; and they think they have a right to be free of arbitrary punishment," he says. "And they're right -- except when they go to work."
Two former cocktail waitresses at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, for example, are suing the company over a policy that lets the casino fire servers who gain more than 7% of their body weight and can't shed it during a three-month leave of absence.
In January, four workers lost their jobs at Weyco because they refused to stop smoking -- off company premises. The company had adopted a policy in 2003 of no longer hiring smokers and offering smoking-cessation courses to workers who smoked. The four workers were terminated because they refused to take a nicotine test. And last September, Lynne Gobbell of Moulton, Ala., was fired from her job at Enviromate for driving to work with a John Kerry bumper sticker on her car.
Unless employees fall in one of a handful of classifications defined by law, employers can terminate them at will. "You can fire someone for any reason or no reason at all so long as it's not discriminatory," says Manny Avramidis, senior vice president of human resources at the American Management Association. But he notes that corporate fears of creative lawyers and a desire to retain good workers can act as inhibitors.
Other observers of workers' rights agree that state laws are uneven and that the federal government's measures often set protection standards that are too difficult to meet or are so narrowly defined that their effect is limited. In the case of email monitoring, for example, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 makes it illegal for an employer to intercept communications, but experts say it applies to phone communications, not email.
If we must deprive people on a payroll of their rights, then at least we should deprive them all equally. The past few months may have been open season on imperial chief executives, but all it takes is a half-suspecting HR executive or a semi-twitchy lawyer to begin monitoring the Internet use of almost any company staffer.
By contrast, it arguably required an act of Congress to look over the shoulders of those in the executive suite. "Sarbanes-Oxley is their monitoring device -- that's the new executive monitoring," says Mr. Avramidis. "It's a taste of their own medicine."
The chief executive of Boeing, for example, was recently fired for sending explicit emails to a lover working at the company. It wasn't having the affair that got him fired, but the use of language that would have embarrassed the company, a violation of Boeing's conduct code. Still, the scandal that ensued centered less on the affair and the language in the email and more on the fact that he had been fired.
Companies that market employee-monitoring software claim their programs can help prevent the loss of trade secrets and limit legal liability by discouraging sexual harassment. They also exploit fears that employees are ripping off employers by Web surfing on company time. Based in part on a recent productivity survey, WebSense, one of the bigger makers of the software, estimated the total annual cost of employees goofing around online at $138 billion for some 53 million employees.
Incidentally, that high cost is a little less than the estimated $140 billion in shareholder losses that followed disclosures that a handful of guys at Enron, Adelphia, WorldCom and Tyco were goofing around on the job.
作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 This is so true in the real world: (zt) -- ceo/cfo - (5340 Byte) 2005-5-19 周四, 06:31 (744 reads)
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