Big Brother

Workplace privacy has always been a sensitive issue that weighs a boss’s right to know what’s going on in the office against an employees right to be left alone. But in Illinois that delicate balance has been upset by a new state law that permits bosses to eavesdrop on employees’ work phones. As originally conceived by telemarketers and retailers, the law was intended solely to enable supervisors to monitor service calls for courtesy and efficiency. But on its way to Republican Governor Jim Edgar for a Dec. 13 signing, the measure was reworked to embrace any listening in that serves “educational, training or research purposes” without defining inappropriate monitoring. The final bill is more permissive than laws in many other states as well as the federal wiretap law, which instructs listeners to hang up if they chance upon a personal call.
This leaves Illinois workers skittishly wondering who might be listening in, and when. After all, in this era of expanding work hours and contracting leisure time, who hasn’t used the office phone to learn the results of an anxiously awaited medical test or to do battle with a creditor? “I don’t condone the misuse of company telephones, but suppose you call home with a marital or financial problem. Clearly, you are in jeopardy if your employer knows something about those kinds of things,” says a union chief whose organization represents Northwest Airlines telephone-reservation operators. “It’s a George Orwell kind of thing.”