Legal Question in Employment Law in Washington
Employer property or employee's private space
An employee is on admin leave for a couple incidents, have a question about one in particular. If an employee has pornographic material on his personal thumb drive, in his employer owned locker, has the thumb drive removed from his locker unknowingly by someone else and left out where another employee took it and opened it up on the employer computer, is the employer able to fire/discipline the employee for having it at work. Even though the employee never opened it there and someone else stole it from the locker? It may be important to know the employee is a public service worker, is a supervisor, and is covered by union bargaining agreement. To this point the contract has been followed.
1 Answer from Attorneys
Re: Employer property or employee's private space
Terms of the collective bargaining agreement would be important to this issue, and what follows should be weighed with that in mind.
The employee arguably has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his locker unless he has been told that the locker may be subject to inspection, or unless he shares the locker with another person. Unless the pornography is of an illegal nature (eg child porn), it might be tough to make the dismissal stick.
However, I also must remark that something seems odd about the chain of events and I suspect there may be more to the story. Someone "unknowingly" removes the thumb drive and leaves it out for a third party? It seems there may be some additional material details here.
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