Sex Spam & Sexual Harrasment At Workplace
Q: Have been reading couple of articles about spam which contain sexual
material, and how it is recommended that corporations revise their email and
sexual harassment policy.
Has there ever been a case where an employee has sued his or her employer
for getting sexual spam and/or the employer not taking necessary steps in
stopping those spam?
A:In New Zealand the Occupational Health and Safety ("OSH") legislation
puts a very strong duty on the employer to provide a safe workplace.
Safety in this respect includes, but is not limited to, freedom from
sexual or other harrassment.
It is generally understood that allowing pornographic images to be
present in the workplace, whether in hardcopy or electronic form, is
not consistent with OSH requirements but there have been no cases that
I know of related to images of this type.
The nearest case I can think of is where an employee (a Police
photographer whose job required taking pictures, for evidential
purposes, of harrowing scenes such as vehicle crash sites / murder
sites) suffered mental stress and successfully sued his employer under
the OSH legislation.
It is also an offence (in NZ) to store some classes of material in a
computer system. People have certainly been convicted for possessing
these, primarily kiddy-porn, but again I am not aware of any
prosecurions of employers for this: this is another reason for
having, and enforcing, usage policies though.