by Elizabeth M Young

Created on: September 21, 2009   Last Updated: March 17, 2010

The hardcore perspective that is in favor of the business takes the approach that the Internet access, as with telephone access is property of the business, and is to be used strictly for the business. By that perspective, personal use of these accesses is to be limited. Further, a person's conduct while using the phone or Internet for personal business, reflects on the business or causes other problems. For example an employee who uses the business phone to conduct and make profit from their own private business has long been a cause for termination. An employee who is arrested on the job for making threatening or harassing phone calls from the workplace has caused a lot of trouble for the employer.

It is the same with electronically transmitted written communication. First, if the communication is not related to work, then it can be seen as unauthorized use of company assets, including the employee's time, which is costly enough. Second, if the communication brings harm to the company, the insult is doubled. Third, if the communication brings harm, disruption or insult to the company or to the other employees of the company, than that is misconduct while abusing company resources.

In other words, the company has every right to monitor employee internet use to the extent needed to determine whether company assets are being misused, abused, or overused for personal business.

On the other hand, if an employee is so attached to the desk that getting to the bank is impossible, and does a little banking and bill paying on line, the company should definitely be prohibited from gaining access to passwords or any other secure personal access information and rifling through those accounts.

It is the company that is forcing the employee to work under conditions where getting away from the desk to go to the bank during business hours is not possible. As a result, the company should be forced to stay out of sneaking around inside of private personal on line accounts that a person accesses. That the person used the company computer to access a personal account is an other issue, and as long as any employer inquiries end at the log in page, fine.

In fact, the employer should be required to inform employees of:

1. The extent of their monitoring and whether they store and use passwords to access personal on line accounts.

2. A set amount of time per day that is determined to be excessive for personal use of the Internet while at work.

3. The exact conditions of any specific type of abuse, and the exact consequences that will apply to all, fairly and equally, for the abuse. It is one of the sickest parts of working anywhere to see some one who seriously did wrong, breezing into work, while a far better employee was fired for a far less serious infraction.

If "employee abuse of the Internet" cannot be defined, then it is an arbitrary excuse for anything that the company wants to do, including firing employees in order to make them ineligible for unemployment insurance benefits.

As a result, the ethics of monitoring employee's Internet use in the workplace will only be as good as the company's overall ethics, period. If the company abuses the employees through corrupt supervision, management and labor practices, then monitoring Internet use is only one more area for the company to abuse, even when the employees are not abusing anything.

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