Each American’s fundamental, unalienable rights are outlined in the United States Constitution. Business leaders should be familiar with constitutional law to prevent enforcing laws, policies, and practices that can be declared unconstitutional. A company will face legal repercussions if it violates the constitutional rights of a client or an employee. In the assigned case, the employee must report their social media login data, and this request causes concerns pertaining to the right to privacy (Chemerinsky, 2019). This paper addresses ethical traps for StuffMart and the constitutional reasons enabling the employee to provide no social media data.
The employer has the right to insist that the employee act in a way that is appropriate for the business. As a result, the employer may demand that the employee refrain from publishing something on social media that disparages the company. However, the firm does not have the authority to eavesdrop on employees’ discussions. Before making a job offer, many companies look at the applicant’s open social media sites. This data is openly accessible and is obtained through a standard background investigation (Murphy et al., 2019).
The job applicant has a constitutional basis for refusing to comply with the employer’s directions. It is because the employer is infringing on the employee’s right to self-expression through his/her speech by wanting to regulate their communication in their personal, non-business-related social media profiles. The first term to suggest the presence of the basis to avoid complying with Stuffmart’s SM practices is that “abridging the freedom of speech” is not permissible (United States Senate, 2017, para. 96). The First Amendment cited above guarantees the absence of laws or rules to deprive citizens of that right. In contradiction to it, the employer seeks to monitor employees’ speech outside of business contexts.
The second phrase to prove the constitutional basis for rejecting the employer’s directions involves the citizen’s “right to be secure… in their papers… against unreasonable searches” (United States Senate, 2017, para. 99). The Fourth Amendment cited above holds that violating this right is prohibited; the practice of logging into the employee’s SM profiles may qualify as a search of the individual’s papers without any good reason, such as protecting public safety. Finally, both constitutional arguments would matter if StuffMart was a public employer because the amendments are supposed to be applicable universally, and no exceptions for public employees are provided.
References
Chemerinsky, E. (2019). Constitutional law: Principles and policies. Aspen Publishing.
Murphy, W. F., Fleming, J. E., Barber, S. A., & Macedo, S. (2019). American constitutional interpretation. Foundation Press.
United States Senate. (2017). U.S. Senate: Constitution of the United States. Senate.gov. Web.