“Don’t be on your phone,” my manager said to me in a hurried fashion. “They’re watching us right now, and I don’t want to have to get yelled at.” So went a night at my part-time job a few weeks ago. I hadn’t actually been on my phone, but my manager was giving me, and well, all of my coworkers, a warning to stay off our cell phones because our supervisor was watching our every move. Not from the store floor, but from her home. She’d recently gotten an iPhone and now could watch everything going on in the store from the comfort of her couch.
Many of you might shrug your shoulders at this story, or many others like them. “What’s the big deal if you’ve got nothing to hide?” say some, echoing similar arguments that we’ve had in the U.S. since the September 11th attacks concerning government monitoring of phone calls, emails and snail mail.
Does it matter? What I mean is, does it matter if you don’t have anything to hide? This country was founded upon the right of private citizens to, well, have a bit of privacy.
That’s what the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is all about – there shall be no unwarranted searches and seizures, and no warrants can be issued for a search or seizure but upon probable cause. While that might have been the case before September 11th, when the Fourth Amendment actually meant something, before the PATRIOT Act and before Bush’s wiretap program, the Fourth Amendment has never meant anything on the job or in any relation to your employer. Once you enter the workplace, you cease to be a citizen and become instead an employee, a person with no rights whatsoever (unless of course, you belong to a labor union).
I am exaggerating a bit (you do have the right to $7.25 an hour and overtime pay) but the point is that on the job, you are essentially a subject of your boss. You can’t critize your boss, even if you aren’t on the clock. There have been cases of employees being fired for Facebook posts or posts on Twitter. In other words, freedom of speech, too, as long as it concerns your boss or your job, isn’t a right you really have.
Our ancestors disavowed the notion that you shouldn’t be allowed to criticize the king. They fought a war to free the American people from unjust and tyrannical British laws that hampered freedom of speech. We held that no king, nor pope, nor president was above criticizism. In America, not even God Almighty has the right not to be criticized.
But in a strange twist of events, middle management does have the right to not be criticized. If the president of the U.S. is not above criticism, why should the manager of a McDonald’s be?
The greatest freedom in the world is the freedom of speech. It’s a shame we don’t really have that here in the good ‘ol USA.
Column by Devin Griggs, opinion editor. Devin serves as president of the Murray State College Democrats.