On-line and OK?

David Winch, UN

Suddenly in late 2002, the UN Geneva intranet home page started featuring a new message:

Staff members are reminded that personal computers and access to Internet are provided to them by the Organization for the performance of their official duties.

Did we miss something? The message provided no link to an explanatory document, a recent ST/AI, for example, or to a statement by the Director-General or other top UN administration official. No rules or guidelines were provided, nor any details as to regulations and/or penalties. And staff input in this policy appeared to be zero.

UNOG staff can only wonder: Is looking at the New York Times on-line Business section an offence? What if watching commodity prices or political trends is part of one’s job description? But then, what if one clicks on the Sports news there, to check on the Yankees — probably not part of any UN staff’s job description. A fireable offense?

If so, then Amazon. com, Land’s End and Easyjet. com are surely tickets to Siberia.

In fact, the principle stated above – the employer pays for the computers, hence controls all use – has become a very contentious issue in European labour law. The UNOG position is sharply out of step with recent legal thinking on employees’ “on-line rights”. At its most expansive, Scandinavian trade unionists now call for “unlimited Internet access at work”.

Like phone calls ?

By coincidence, the week the intranet notice began appearing, UNOG Library highlighted in its Recent Acquisitions display a new copy of “On-line Rights for Employees in the Information Society: Use and Monitoring of E-mail and Internet at Work”, a special issue of the Bulletin of Comparative Labour Relations (Kluwer, The Hague, 2002) devoted to this question.

In this 280-page work, 20 lawyers, technical specialists, union reps and governmental authorities debate the key issues: What rights does an employer have to control the use of workplace tools? And, where does privacy begin at work?

Are private phone calls from work the same as e-mails? Can all workplace communication be legally monitored? Is “misuse”, however defined, cause for sacking?

Most important: Is it possible to motivate a post-industrial workforce and closely monitor their reading material? Finally, is Internet surfing an emerging workplace issue, like regular breaks and subsidized cafeterias were for earlier generations?

R. Blancpain, editor of the “On-line Rights” volume, includes a range of papers submitted to a conference, held at Brussels in November 2000, that includes discussions by business of the risks an employer may face – computer viruses, hackers, law-suits over e-mail harassment, loss of corporate secrets and/or exposure to copyright infringment.

Union officials at the seminar repeatedly argue that there has to be provision for fair-use of company e-mail by labour representatives. Denial of e-mail use should be a violation of labour law. The private use of e-mail is repeatedly addressed. Participants generally feel it has to be “normalized”; if needed, separation of personnel and private e-mail can be assured through providing private-mail Inboxes for staff.

Zone of privacy

Blancpain mirrors the general conclusions of the seminar: “The employer is entitled to specify how the employment contract is to be carried out, including access to intranet, the Internet and to surfing facilities”. On the other hand, he writes, “Clearly, clandestine monitoring is unacceptable. Transparency should prevail […] there is indeed an inviolable zone of privacy, to be construed as broadly as possible, which can only be invaded when the employer can prove legitimate reasons. ”

“[…] The best way to do this is by negotiating a code of conduct on the use of e-mail, intranet, the Internet and other means of communications,” he concludes.

Peter Johnston of the European Commission’s Directorate General for the Information Society notes that holding on to staff in an ageing, information-based workforce is also a factor. Treating employees like old-economy robots does not work, “especially those with softer ‘social skills’ of teamworking, creativity and communications. ”

Eamonn Sheahy, an IT manager from Brussels, points out that while common sense should prevail regarding the personal use of e-mail, company codes are needed to specify its use, just as they are for telephone, fax, post and use of letter-head. But what is the employee to do about incoming personal e-mail? If a reply takes 5 minutes, is that OK, but 10 minutes an infraction? A code can help.

The Web, by contrast, poses a whole range of new issues. Research via the Internet is increasing, but the time spent on-line is not easily controllable. What if numerous searches are needed, some of which lead to unwanted sites? Sheehy points out that the single most-searched word on the Internet is “sex” which, again, would not likely be on the work schedule of most UN employees. But it certainly could be for some in, say, the health and reproductive health areas. — Who is to decide what is “misuse”?

Monitoring potential misuse can be quite expensive, stresses Sheahy: “Now more organizations have to dedicate resources to protect the organization from the inside-out. More sophisticated or dedicated firewalls are needed to monitor the outbound traffic. Time and resources to implement the blocking of ‘banned’ sites is required […]”

“Speaking personally, I would prefer not to have to do this,” he concludes.

As this debate gathers steam, perhaps UN administrators should not be the last to know the costs and consequences of lacking an up-to-date and transparent on-line policy.

The author is an editor at UN Geneva (dwinch@unog.ch ).