MY BOSS, BIG BROTHER

By Jill Smolowe

YOU PLAYED THE GROWNUP WHEN your boss dropped by your desk and, without so much as a "Good morning," disemboweled your latest departmental memo. You nodded, scribbled notes, praised his constructive criticism. Now, too peeved to concentrate, you phone a colleague and let your inner child rage. Grrrr. Insensitive troglodyte. Unappreciative bonehead. Grrrr. There, you feel better. Back to work.

Just as you're beginning to see that your boss's critique was not so off base, he suddenly reappears, demanding to know what you meant by "troglodyte"--a word he intercepted while monitoring your phone line. Now you've got a real problem.

Workplace privacy has always been a sensitive issue that weighs a boss's right to know what's going on in the office against an employee's right to be left alone. But in Illinois that delicate balance has been upset by a new state law that permits bosses to eavesdrop on employees' work phones. As originally conceived by telemarketers and retailers, the law was intended solely to enable supervisors to monitor service calls for courtesy and efficiency. But on the way to Republican Governor Jim Edgar for a Dec. 13 signing, the measure was reworked to embrace any listening in that serves "educational, training or research purposes" without defining inappropriate monitoring. The final bill is more permissive than laws in many other states, as well as the federal wiretap law, which instructs listeners to hang up if they chance upon a personal call.

This leaves Illinois workers skittishly wondering who might be listening in, and when. After all, in this era of expanding work hours and contracting leisure time, who hasn't used the office phone to learn the results of an anxiously awaited medical test or to do battle with a creditor? "I don't condone the misuse of company telephones, but suppose you call home with a marital or a financial problem. Clearly, you are in jeopardy if your employer knows something about those kinds of things," says Nan Otto, a union chief whose organization represents Northwest Airlines telephone-reservation operators. "It's the George Orwell kind of thing."

"We have no desire to become Big Brother," counters Rob Karr of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association. He points out that the law forbids taped conversations from being passed on to third parties and requires employers to gain permission before they eavesdrop. But the Illinois law is unclear whether that means telling employees each time they plan to listen or issuing just a one-time blanket warning. As for bosses who stumble into private conversations, Karr says if a worker is doing personal business on company time, bosses "probably have the right to be listening in."

Civil libertarians harrumph about "electronic sweatshops," and the AFL-CIO aims to prove that the law violates Illinois' bill of rights, which guards against "interceptions of communications by eavesdropping devices." Meantime, smart workers might do best to stew in silence. Grrrr.

--By Jill Smolowe. Reported by Mark Shuman/Chicago

With reporting by Mark Shuman/Chicago