Employment Law Case Study

Business is all about decisions. There are decisions regarding staffing, products, contracts, and policies just to name a few. Executives are plagued with an enormous amount of pressure to make the right decisions on all accounts. When one adds in the legal aspects applicable to business, the job of the executive becomes all the more difficult. There are both federal and state laws applicable to almost every size and type of business. At times, the law is not clear and concise resulting in a need for interpretation. This interpretation is provided through the courts in the form of case law (Kubasek, Browne, Herron, Dhooge, & Barkacs, 2016). As judges decide cases, their opinions or interpretations become law (Kubasek, Browne, Herron, Dhooge,

The relationship between an employee and employer has not always been healthy, therefore laws were created to protect the employees. There are several examples of the impact employment case law can have on a business, although the case of City of Ontario, California v. Quon (2010) shed some much needed interpretation onto the area of employee privacy. The Ontario Police Department provided text enabled pagers to officers and after months of overages, decided to pull text message transcripts to determine whether the text message limit needed to be raised (City of Ontario, California v. Quon, 2010). Upon pulling transcripts, the Department found many of the messages being sent were not work related, although Quon was on work time (City of Ontario, California v. Quon, 2010). The Department did provide a copy of the computer usage policy to the employees prior to pager distribution. The court determined that the search of messages on company owned devices was reasonable (City of Ontario, California v. Quon, 2010). An important point in this case was the provided computer usage policy. Businesses are able to monitor employee’s work devices and accounts, although a clear and concise policy on the topic will help clarify the expectations for