U-M expert discusses the challenges of e-communication at work

No one wants to end up like Detroit’s beleaguered mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, and one U-M expert explains how to avoid those electronic pitfalls.

Excerpt:

Several recent high-profile cases have highlighted the hazards of electronic communications.

There’s the text-messaging scandal in Detroit, which resulted in multiple felony charges against Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.

And nationally, two former managers of hedge funds in the subprime loan debacle have been charged with fraud and conspiracy because they allegedly admitted in e-mails to each other that they knew the funds were headed for disaster – even while assuring investors they were stable.

University of Michigan Associate Professor J.J. Prescott, an expert on labor law, discussed what employees should expect when they’re communicating by e-mail.

Q: Do employees at private companies run the same risk of firing or prosecution for private text messages or e-mails on company equipment?

A: It’s the employers who have the rights.

If anything, people in the private sector have fewer rights because they are working on somebody else’s property. Unless there is a specific agreement about whether the employer can look at texts or not, employees don’t have many rights at all, and even those remedies would just be to sue in civil court.

And that wouldn’t stop prosecution.

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