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>At my previous job, our technical writing
>department manager used to regularly screen
>our e-mails for evidence of job dissatisfaction,
>job hunting, or slanders of her managerial
>talent.
Boy, you sure can pick 'em. Two jobs in a row where the management has
the time to spy on employees? All of the companies I've worked for were
far too busy to worry about this. Have you considered trading the
stability of large organizations (I'm assuming, here) for the chaos (but
less dehumanizing treatment) of a small company?
>At least one member of the department
>was reprimanded by this manager for complaining
>about the manager in a supposedly private
>Yahoo! e-mail. Was this legitimate or was this
>an invasion of privacy?
Of course it's an invasion of privacy, but it's likely completely
legitimate as well. Those two aren't mutually exclusive. The company owns
the computers, owns the Internet connection, and likely made you sign an
employee agreement promising that any thought you had during working
hours belongs to the company. Don't like it? Stop working for companies
that do this. You have few if any grounds to complain, and no way to stop
it, so you can either knuckle under and stop checking your Yahoo mail (or
whatever) at work, or leave. (You could take other steps, like
PGP-encrypting all of your mail so your boss can't see you trashing her,
but that step alone would probably get you reprimanded.)
Sorry to be so bleak, but that's the way I understand it. Good luck with
that job search... ;-)
----->Mike
________________________________________________________________
stockman -at- jagunet -dot- com -- AOL and AOL Instant Messenger:MStockman
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