A Comparative Study on the Interaction Between the Privacy of the Workers’ Electronic Communications and the Right to Ownership of the Employer in Laws of Iran and the US

On the one hand, the right of property of employer generally requires that any possession be permitted for him/her, even if the possession leads to the violation of the privacy of the workers and employees. On the other hand, respect for the privacy of individuals, including workers, requires that the confidentiality of their information and communications be protected and consequently, all of the actions violating privacy be forbidden. The question which arises here is how to act in the event of a conflict between these two rights? In the American law, most of the courts, with some considerations, take the employer's side on the basis of "the employer's right to own the workplace space", "the workshop policy right" as well as "the lack of confidentiality and lack of normal expectation of privacy". In Iranian law, it seems that on the one hand, the exercise of the employer's right, in practice, corresponds to the violation of another's right and loss, and on the other hand, the impossibility of exercising the supervision right is to the detriment of the employer and his interests. Therefore, based on the “rule of importance” the priority is given to the right of the one of more s9gnificance. In this regard, it can be said that the employer, in order to bring the two interfering rights together, can take actions to control the relationships among the workers inside the network under his supervision with the prior allowance or announcement. In this case, the electronic communication of workers can be considered within the scope of the "execution" (Eqdam) and "extinction of respect" (Esqat-e-Ehteram) rules. In this paper, through a descriptive-analytic method, the relationship between these two rights in the two mentioned systems is studied.