It is a pivotal scene in the movie, Bridget Jones’ Diary. The smarmy Daniel Cleaver as played by Hugh Grant begins a flirty e-mail exchange at the office with Bridget Jones, as played by Renee Zellweger. It starts with a comments about the length of her skirt:
You appear to have forgotten your skirt. As I think is made perfectly clear in your contract of employment, staff are expected to be fully dressed at all times.
Cleave
And then the conversation quickly escalates into inappropriate behavior. Being the cad that he is, Cleaver ends the exchange with a lame “apology” for sexual harassment, capped with:
P.S. Like your tits in that top.
The fact that Daniel Cleaver was Bridget Jones’ boss makes the matter even worse though, according to employment law attorneys, increasingly common. While in the movies, the exchange was flirty and the beginning of a relationship (of sorts), in real life, such exchanges can lead to hostile work environments and the inevitable lawsuit to follow.
Some employers have gone so far as to monitor employee email to ensure that emails which originate from the workplace remain professional in nature.
But email is so 2008. The new medium of choice for harassment in the workplace? OMG, it’s texting.
Text messages are becoming a new source of headaches for employers. And unlike email, text messages feel more casual, perhaps emboldening employees to send messages as jokes - when one party didn’t feel like it was a joke. Texting sexual message or “sexting” has become almost a game: text messages are quick and easy - accessible at any time of day or night, including at social events where there might be drinking and flirting.
Text messages are also forever. Sending a text that might be regretted easily can’t be undone - and serves as evidence of an inappropriate comment. That evidence may be admissible in a lawsuit.
But that puts the employer in a dilemma: should an employer have a policy of reviewing employee text messages? And if the employer wants to review all of the messages, does he or she have the right to do so?
It’s a developing area of the law. Stay tuned FWIW.
Similar Posts:
- None Found
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
One of the newest harrassing text-grams are from collection agents. They are setting up ways to text overdue clients and although the FDCPA states that the company may not require the consumer to incur debt or costs for the collection, there is nothing specific in the law to prohibit such an activity.
I am working on one case where the company has been texting for over 170 days.