Page 1335 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 24 March 2010
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and we believe that, by and large, this bill will have little impact on those businesses that engage in honest and open dialogue with their employees about surveillance and monitoring.
However, this bill will impact upon those few employers who act dishonestly regarding methods of watching their employees in the workplace. In this and other jurisdictions, employees have found themselves surveilled by their employers dishonestly and with intent. Employees have discovered hidden cameras concealed within their workplaces months after they have been installed, they have had their emails read without their knowledge or permission and their movements have been tracked without their knowledge both whilst at work and afterwards.
In some of the worst cases in Australia, workers have been filmed at work without their permission, only to discover embarrassing footage of themselves uploaded to YouTube or, in one case, shown, to their dismay, at the office Christmas party. Workers have had private emails between their work email addresses and their loved ones distributed by their employers. It is this type of surveillance that we seek to restrict.
We must emphasise, before we go into the detail, that this bill in no way restricts an employer from legitimate overt monitoring of work areas for security or employee monitoring purposes. The only obligation on these employers is to disclose to their employees that they will be monitored and for what purpose.
This bill is partially based upon the Workplace Surveillance Act as it operates in New South Wales. We have made several improvements to the bill, in some cases based upon the national privacy principles that regulate privacy interactions between businesses and consumers, in others based upon feedback provided on the operation of the Workplace Surveillance Act in New South Wales by groups such as the Australian Privacy Foundation.
This bill makes a distinction between three types of surveillance—notified, covert and prohibited—and identifies three primary categories of surveillance, being optical, computer and tracking.
I turn to notified surveillance. This section of the legislation will cover the vast majority of surveillance conducted within a workplace. This legislation will place upon employers a requirement to fully disclose where and when they will be surveilled at work. We have listed offences for failing to comply with these basic notification requirements. There are further specific requirements for optical, data and tracking surveillance.
For optical surveillance, the camera, camera housing or other equipment indicating the presence and location of a camera must be clearly visible in the workplace. Furthermore, each entrance to the workplace must have a sign clearly indicating that workers may be under surveillance in the workplace. The employer is not required to provide notification to a worker for a workplace that is not their usual place of work.
In the case of data or computer surveillance, the employer is required to develop a policy on the usage of data surveillance devices and notify the worker prior to
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