Workplace privacy: isues and implications.

• Author: Losey, Michael R.

PRIVACY in the workplace always has been controversial, but interest has been heightened in recent years by increasingly sophisticated means of conducting random drug tests, background checks, and electronic performance monitoring. While the significance of workplace privacy has increased, so has its politics, making this issue one of particular importance and sensitivity in corporate America.

In a study conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), human resource professionals most consistently favored the use of drug and alcohol testing, soliciting criminal records checks, and monitoring visual display terminal (VDT) keystrokes and phone activity. While employers may deem these activities as essential to preserve workplace safety and productivity, many employees would argue that they violate their privacy, both on the job and at home.

What if work performance is impeded by personal interests or other activities, however? Employer advocates maintain that companies have the right to hire the bestqualified individual for the job and exercise certain expectations of that person. They also argue that they have a right and a responsibility to protect legitimate business interests through quality control, workplace safety, and health care cost containment.

Few would dispute that employers have certain rights and responsibilities, but at what cost to the personal rights of their workers? The boundaries delineating acceptable and unacceptable intervention into an employee's private life are being expanded rapidly. Many privacy rights activists fear that the list of unacceptable habits, hobbies, or health conditions soon will be fair game in the office.

For example, smoking in the workplace has been banned in many organizations, particularly as a result of recent studies that revealed the dangers of secondhand smoke, but should employers have the right to prohibit smoking at home, too? There is a proven corollary between smoking and the likelihood of developing serious (and costly) diseases, and employers consider those who smoke at all to be so sufficiently at-risk that they are advocating a right to recourse.

In the SHRM Privacy in the Workplace survey, 77% of the human resource professionals who responded endorsed a company's right to establish health care differentials in the insurance premiums of those who smoke. Employee advocates worry that this may enable employers to test for cholesterol, hypertension, or even genetic anomalies.

Workers' fears regarding the future of testing may not be unfounded. In 1993, the municipal government of Athens, Ga., proposed that every job applicant be administered a cholesterol test, eliminating those whose levels ranked in the highest 20%. When a vehement local outcry ensued, the policy was abandoned. While the proposal was axed, it still serves to illustrate the length to which some employers have attempted to extend testing.

Drug testing still is divisive, but now widely accepted as a means of maintaining workplace safety and productivity standards. Yet, alcohol, though legally and socially acceptable, is a durg capable of impairing job performance, and some companies already prohibit its off-site consumption.

In Indiana, an employee was terminated when he volunteered that he occasionally drank socially in his off hours, a violation of company policy. The Indiana Court of Appeals ruled that the firm could not demonstrate that his drinking had a negative impact on his work performance or there...