American Workers Beware: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING

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

For the most part, however, self-regulation failed. When the privacy commission's chairman, David Linowes, a professor at the University of Illinois, did a follow-up study of 74 Fortune 500 companies in 1979, he found that few had followed the commission's advice. Three-quarters, for instance, used information from employees' medical records in making decisions affecting their careers. Linowes cited the case of a woman who was denied a promotion after her employer learned that the woman's mother had been treated by a psychiatrist, which the employer took as a sign that mental illness ran in the family. (Ten years later, Linowes repeated his survey, with similarly discouraging results. Most companies still used medical information in making decisions about employees, and 85% routinely shared information from personnel files with workers' creditors.)

In 1980, Richard Neustadt, then a White House domestic policy advisor, noted that such practices as monitoring employees' conversations, using polygraphs and cameras on assembly lines, and denying workers access to records were common in both the manufacturing and service sectors. Nevertheless, in the decade that followed, aided by advances in computing, employers subjected employees to monitoring on an unprecedented scale. According to a 1987 report prepared for Congress by the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), 4-6,000,000 American workers were monitored at their desks by computer programs that tracked everything from the number of keyboard errors they made a day to the duration of their breaks.

In addition, companies were testing employees in ways that probed not just their on-the-job performance, but their attitudes, beliefs, and activities outside the workplace. By 1987, employers were administering nearly 2,000,000 polygraph tests a year to job applicants and employees. Some included questions about religious or political beliefs, sex lives, and union affiliations. Millions of workers were required to produce urine samples under observation for drug testing, although the tests frequently were inaccurate. (The report also noted that some of these tests "reveal information that is not only personal, but is arguably not relevant to the employment situation.") At one company, management used video surveillance cameras to prevent more than one worker from going to the restroom at a time, as a way of hindering attempts to organize a union.

Few safeguards

In its study, the Office of Technology Assessment noted that companies generally had few safeguards to keep information gathered about employees confidential. Once negative information was gathered about a worker, it conceivably could follow that individual for the rest of his or her career. The report concluded: "The intensity and continuousness of computer-based monitoring raises questions about privacy, fairness, and quality of work life."

OTA's 1987 report spelled out for Congress a pervasive problem that affected millions of American workers. The following year, after an intense lobbying effort by the American Civil Liberties Union, organized labor, and other privacy advocates, Congress passed the Employee Polygraph Protection Act, which barred the use of lie detectors to screen new hires. Under this legislation, employers could test employees only if there was a "reasonable suspicion" of wrongdoing. Additionally, employers had to advise workers of their rights, including the right not to take a test, and employees couldn't be dismissed on the basis of the results unless there was other evidence of wrongdoing as well.