Work survelance summary and opinion

Kyle Grimes
Murphy
English 51
6 October 2009
Summary and Opinion of Essay p.337
You should be careful when you are at work because almost all bigger companies are watching you. They will check up on your emails, internet usage, phone calls, and have you on video surveillance while you are at work. Some employers have video surveillance on you all the time, while some other employers check at random. The employers take some pre-cautions sometimes to prevent misuse of telecommunications at work such as putting up firewalls for internet use. They also may only permit you to call certain numbers that are work related and monitor your email for work use only. They also monitor the emails between employees to make sure that it is work related and work friendly. Most employers let their employees use their own discretion to decipher from what is right and what is wrong. But once the employees cross the line that is when the employer will intervene to prevent future incidents. Employees were either fired or disciplined when they were caught for misuse. Before telecommunications were as accessible as they are today, there were only a handful of employers that monitored their employees. Since then there has been nearly a ten percent increase in monitoring. “…monitoring telephone numbers called (43percent), logged computer time (19 percent), and video surveillance for security purposes (38 percent).” More and more employers are monitoring their employees with the growth and ease of accessibility of technology. “It is important to note, however, that 90 percent of the companies engaging in any of there practices inform their employees that they are doing so.”
In my opinion I think it is perfectly fine to be monitoring employees at work. All employees go through a background check before they are hired, but what if they just have not been caught yet. You can never fully trust anyone with anything. Many employees’ arguments are that it is an invasion of privacy. If you have nothing to hide then you should have no problem being monitored with what you are doing at work. Many may think that it is wrong morally, but legally employers have the right to monitor everything that you do at work. I think it is ridiculous on how much is spent on the monitoring. If employees were doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing, then the money spent on the monitoring services could be spent on higher hourly wages for the employees. Either way you can not trust anyone with anything and that is why many employers monitor employees.