What employers need to know about a new employee monitoring law - Buffalo Business First - Buffalo Business First
A state law going into effect in May is one to which employers will need to pay attention.
The new employee monitoring law requires employers to provide employees written notice upon hiring and once annually if the employer will be electronically monitoring them.
As of May 7, any employer reviewing emails, corporate communications, phone conversations or online activity of their employees must notify them that they’re being monitored.
“Many companies already were doing that, but they just weren’t telling their employees,” said Matthew Miller, partner at Rupp Baase Pfalzgraf Cunningham LLC. “It’s something that’s already going on, and many employees are aware that they’re using an email that their employer is monitoring. This just puts everyone on written notice.”
The law will allow for more transparency in the workplace and will help employers avoid privacy litigations, Miller said.
“It’s actually an employer-friendly amendment to the civil rights law,” he said. “It’s not going to be that burdensome on employers to provide that kind of notice.”
The notice to existing employees could be posted in a break room or in a location available to all employees. The law is unclear if remote employees or out-of-state employees need to be included in the notice, Miller said.
“If they have employees working out-of-state, they have to think about what that remote employee’s place of business is,” he said. “They might not be subject to the law. I think there’s an easy solution to the question with remote employees, and that is to provide the notice to everybody. The law stops short of requiring that, but you should still do that.”
The law requires employers to provide a form that employees must acknowledge electronically or sign.
“One of the interesting things is this law doesn’t exclude personal devices,” Miller said. “If they have a policy to bring your own devices, those are encompassed by the notice as well.”
There’s one aspect of the law that employees might not be happy with: “If an employer does violate the law, employees won’t have the right to sue them,” Miller said. “It will be enforced by the Attorney General’s office with different fines.”
Those penalties will range from $500 to $3,000.
According to the National Law Review, monitoring processes for system maintenance is an exception to the new notification law if that process doesn’t target an individual and used solely for system maintenance and protection.
source: https://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/news/2022/02/18/new-york-state-employee-monitoring-law.html
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