Workplace Monitoring Case Summary

Workplace monitoring covers the legal allegations of balancing and managing organizational needs to protect and preserve the workplace with the expectation of privacy from its employees. Employers must conduct appropriate steps to reduce the risk of misconduct and other losses by monitoring and establishing policies to protect its employees and property. In this paper, the topic for discussion will provide an analysis of the federal court’s decisions on issues concerning employees’ privacy and limits on an employer’s rights to search and seizure in four separate case studies. Additionally, the discussion will include the impact that the decisions had on an employer’s responsibility and the employee’s rights to privacy.

UAL Corporation The plaintiff, Kevin Sporer argues that UAL breached his privacy and wrongfully fired him. Sporer was an employee with UAL for over 20 years, and ended his employment under “at will” status (Moran, 2014). In 2007, Sporer received an email that contained pornographic material through the company’s email system, in which he forwarded to his personal email account. Sporer then sent an email to the sender of the pornographic material requesting him to not send any further messages that contain inappropriate contents due to the organization’s strict policies. During a routine audit, UAL’s Information Security Department crossed the pornographic email that Sporer forwarded to his personal email. According to the organization, Sporer’s termination resulted of his company’s email policy violation. The organization’s email policy states that all message content must always be professional, and prohibits the transmission of any messages that compromise such policy (Moran, 2014). Additionally, the organization’s policy also prohibits the transmission of profane, derogatory, and obscene material. Sporer clearly understood UAL’s email policy and knew that email was regularly audited and monitored. He was repeatedly informed about the monitoring system of all activity conducted on the workplace computers, including emails. The disclosure that informed Sporer of this each time the computer was signed into could not be bypassed without selecting “OK” to clear the notice of the system monitoring (Moran, 2014). Additionally, when Sporer requested for the sender of the pornographic material to not send that type of content because of UAL’s strict policy indicates that he was completely aware of the monitoring and the policy. By forwarding the email to his personal email account was a breach of UAL’s policies and instead of deleting it (Moran, 2014). The monitoring of company systems serve to protect sensitive information