Employee freedoms and monitoring
What the employer may monitor: proportionality, the prerequisites of a system, email and files, browsing, video surveillance, geolocation, biometrics, personal devices, the IT charter, the system administrator and social media.
- 25 cards
- 5 topics
- Free
The outline, topic by topic
Each topic is weighted the way the exam weighs it.
- Concepts
- Questions
- Sort and link
- Scenarios
- Understand
A few cards from the deck
Proportionality: what is it?
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The requirement that any restriction on an employee's freedoms be justified by the nature of the task and suited to the aim pursued.
It is the rule of article L1121-1 of the Labour Code: it is the yardstick for any monitoring system, from the badge to geolocation.
An employee has, on his machine, a folder named 'My documents' where he keeps holiday photos. The employer opens it in his absence. What does case law in principle hold?
- It is presumed professional: opening it is allowed
- The folder is personal: the employee had to be present
- A court bailiff had to be present in every case
- The CNIL's prior authorisation was required to open it
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It is presumed professional: opening it is allowed
Only a clear marking as 'personal' or 'private' protects a file. 'My documents' is a generic name on the machine, which does not show that the content is private.
No one may place restrictions on people's rights and on individual and collective freedoms that are not … by the nature of the task to be done nor … to the aim pursued.
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No one may place restrictions on people's rights and on individual and collective freedoms that are not justified by the nature of the task to be done nor proportionate to the aim pursued.
This rule of article L1121-1 of the Labour Code applies to everything an employer does to monitor, film or locate its employees.
Secrecy of correspondence: what is it?
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The ban on reading another person's private messages without their consent; it also protects the employee on their work email when the message is marked as personal.
Breaking this secrecy is a criminal offence. So the employer cannot open on its own a message marked as personal, even on the workstation it provides.
An employee is dismissed on the strength of camera footage that no employee had been told about. Can the evidence be used?
- It is admissible: the employer may freely film its premises
- It is always inadmissible, without exception
- It is unlawful, but admissible if indispensable and proportionate
- It is admissible as soon as the employee has admitted the facts
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It is unlawful, but admissible if indispensable and proportionate
The system was not brought to employees' attention: the evidence is unlawful. The judge may still admit it if it is indispensable to the right to prove one's case and the intrusion on privacy is proportionate to the aim.