Emails and Employees' Rights

In their daily work schedule, employees cannot keep from using the company’s IT facilities to send and receive private emails. This is aside from the business-related ones which are considered official. These emails could stay in an employees’ inbox for an indefinite period of time, and it is understood that private emails are only for that particular employee’s own personal consumption.

The issue with this situation is when an employer needs to access an employee’s email account when the latter is unavailable or absent for any length of time. Legal implications have been associated with employers who are opening their employee’s emails. The German Higher Labor Court early this year ruled that employers have the right to access and review an employee’s work-related email correspondence. It said that the requirements of the “secrecy of telecommunications” do not hold true in these cases. The company cannot be considered a “provider of telecommunication services” although the employee was allowed to use the employer’s email services.

A case once involved a worker who was not present at work due to a long-term illness. The employer was unable to obtain the employee’s consent despite repeated attempts. The employer then opened the employee’s email account, but only those emails that were business-related were read and printed. The owner did this in the presence of two eligible witnesses. Employee’s emails that were “private” and not business-related were neither read nor printed.

As a result, the employee tried to get a court order prohibiting her employer from accessing her email account in the future without her permission. The court denied her, and further repeated that her employer was not a “provider of telecommunication services”. The circumstances do not meet the criteria to fall under such a category.

The Higher Court made it clear that the employee’s use of the company’s email system is just a “side effect” of her normal daily routine. There is no adequate basis to decide that it actually falls under the scope of the Telecommunication s Act. With this present court ruling in Germany, employers can open an employee’s email account even without permission. The limitation would be that only business-related email messages in an employee’s email inbox would be opened, read or printed.

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