Employment law regarding use of institutional or company email, Internet, wifi, and phone systems is a field that is still in flux, and new case law decisions can change the rules quickly. It is clear now, however, and well worth reminding our faculty, that communication to and from district phones and computers may be accessed, used, and/or stored by the Gavilan Community College District. Workplace privacy is not guaranteed for many interactions employing district equipment. A summary of current law is at https://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs7-work.htm. The common sense policy is to limit workplace phone and computer usage for personal communications, particularly any that you would want to remain private, and use District equipment only or primarily for tasks relevant to your work assignment.

To be very specifc, use of district email to send or direct email to a Gavilan employee is subject to district policies and procedures. It is wise for faculty to limit their use of district email to professional topics and professionally written communications.

A second and related issue is GCFA use of district email. For some time, GCFA has been gathering non-Gavilan email addresses from our faculty (addresses we do not sell, publicize, reveal, or even share with more than a few GCFA officers who need them to do their work.) Why? We can use district email without concern for less sensitive topics such as announcing the upcoming social events. But for something like asking your input on a more sensitive topic such as negotiations, it's just not a good idea to go through the district's server, which routinely and daily captures and records email.

The GCFA E Board is committed to providing you with good quality information of use to you as a faculty member at Gavilan. In return, it would be VERY helpful to get a non-Gavilan email address for you that we could use for infrequent but sensitive communications. Please send your home email address to lhalper@garlic.com; it will only be used rarely and for important union business, and will not be shared or sold. At some point, we may need to limit some communications to non-Gavilan email addresses. We'll let you know ahead of time if and when that happens, but in the meantime, we'd really appreciate getting your home email now. It won't take long to hit reply, and you'd save us a lot of time and trouble as we prepare to survey faculty on negotiations issues for the upcoming cycle of talks with our district.