American Workers Beware: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), May, 1999 by Charles Lewis

"When most Americans go to work in the morning, they might just as well be going to a foreign country, because they are equally beyond the reach of the Constitution in both situations. And unfortunately, Federal law does very, very little to fill this void."

The surveillance of employees isn't anything new. In the 19th century, factory owners often intruded into many aspects of their workers' lives, even imposing upon them nightly curfews and requiring that they attend church. Ford Motor Co., in its early years, employed a team of investigators who scrutinized employees' homes and personal finances to determine if they were worthy of profit-sharing bonuses.

In the early 20th century, management theorist Frederick Taylor's concepts of "scientific management" became increasingly popular. The Taylor philosophy took decision-making away from workers and required management continually and systematically to measure employees' performance--an approach which led some companies to equip typewriters with devices that measured the number of keystrokes made.

"Throughout the previous century and up through the 1950s, the right of employers to inquire into any aspect of an employee's life was virtually undisputed," a 1987 report by the Office of Technology Assessment noted. "Employers could choose their employees in any way they wished and were quite free to say, `We want only this kind of person working.' ... [E]mployers compiled psychological profiles, employment histories, and other files of personal data quite unrestrainedly."

When civil libertarians exposed the government's surveillance of citizens in the 1960s, private employers began to receive more scrutiny as well. After Congress passed the Privacy Act in 1974 to rein in data-gathering by the Federal government, it created a Privacy Protection Study Commission to determine the degree to which the private sector needed regulation, too. In 1977, the commission described the scrutiny to which companies routinely subjected workers: "The individual may be examined by the company physician, given a battery of psychological tests, interviewed extensively, and subjected to a background investigation. After hiring, the records the employer keeps about him will again expand to accommodate attendance and payroll data, records concerning various types of benefits, performance evaluations, and much other information gathering--including, we might add, medical records where the employer provides medical insurance."

The commission recommended that, before the government stepped in, companies should try self-regulation and adopt formal privacy policies. In particular, it advocated informing and gaining prior consent from employees before information was gathered about them, separating sensitive medical and health-insurance data from regular employment files, discarding old information about workers that no longer had a justifiable purpose, and curbing polygraph testing and other intimidating modes of surveillance.

Some firms gave it a try. In 1976, even before the commission's formal recommendations were released, Equitable Life became one of the first companies to institute a privacy policy. Edward Cabot, Equitable's vice president and associate counsel, explained at a Labor Department hearing in 1980 that the insurance company's trust in its employees helped build morale and motivation: "Our concern for privacy is an important element in our larger effort to develop and maintain the sort of relationship with our workers which is essential if our employees are to realize their full potential for themselves as well as for the Equitable."