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Employment law is an important-and difficult-area of law to study. It is important because it affects almost everyone, directly or indirectly. It is difficult because it is changing rapidly. Even now, employment law can vary dramatically from state to state. So stay tuned . . ..

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cyberlaw

More than one-third of American companies monitor employee use of electronic equipment in the workplace: telephone calls, voice mail, e-mail, and Internet usage. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA) permits employers to monitor workers' telephone calls and e-mail messages if (1) the employee consents, (2) the monitoring occurs in the ordinary course of business, or (3) in the case of e-mail, the employer provides the e-mail system. However, bosses may not disclose any private information revealed by the monitoring.

About 15 percent of companies monitor their employees' e-mail (as compared with the 40 percent that listen to telephone conversations). Although workers may feel that their e-mail should be private, employers argue that this monitoring improves employee productivity and protects the company from lawsuits. For example, a SW Legal Coast company fired a woman "because of a tough economy." When she sued, her attorneys demanded access to the company's e-mail system as part of the discovery process. They found a message from the woman's supervisor saying, "Get that bitch out of here as fast as you can. I don't care what it takes. Just do it." The supervisor had long since erased the message from his computer, but it had remained buried in the system. A few hours after the message was revealed in court, the company settled for $250,000. If the employee had known that his e-mail would be read by others, perhaps he would not have sent such an inflammatory statement.

Many companies also monitor employee use of the Internet. They are concerned not only about lawsuits but also that workers may be wasting time. During one month, employees at IBM, Apple Computer, and AT&T logged on to Penthouse magazine's Web site 12,823 times, using the equivalent of more than 347 workdays. One company discovered that some of its employees were using their company computers to buy and sell child pornography. Companies fear that even legal logging on to sexually explicit sites may give rise to sexual harassment claims.

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