Employees' home addresses

jds · August 2003

Do we as an employer have a right to obtain our employees' home addresses? One of our employees will only give us a PO Box as their mailing address -- no actual street address. We have an "unwritten" policy that an employee must reside within one hour of the work site.

SMace · August 2003

If you have enforced it consistently, you have a legitimate business reason to require it and it does not have a disparate impact on a protected class, I'm at a loss as to why you can't.

Why would you have a policy (unwritten) that an ee can only live one hour from the worksite?

ljault · August 2003

I would suggest you scrap the "one-hour" policy. You can deal with the attendance issues outside a requirement of where an employee must live - we shouldn't "go there." I don't think it is something you could actually enforce, anyway.

I am experiencing that more and more employees are reticent to share their actual street address, with all the identity theft issues, etc. As long as we can communicate with them, I don't think we can require to know the home address.

NaeNae55 · August 2003

Sometimes they have a reason for you not to know...and you really don't want to know it.

We have an employee who will only give a PO Box number. I gave the employee a ride home once. I was only allowed to drive to the front of the apartment building, as her husband didn't want anyone knowing where they lived. Having known this employee for awhile now I begun to suspect that I know why, but I really didn't want to know. Since I have no proof, I will not share, but sometimes it is better to be left in the dark.

Cotterwood · August 2003

Just the throw something into the 'mix'.
We are a Public Utility District in CA.
We require that all management live within 25 miles of the District, and we require both the physical and mailing address of all employees, regardless. Our employment applications request both mailing and physical.
(If only to know where to drop off the body.) :-)

There is an excellent reason that you should have both. I used to work for Hughes Aircraft Co., and we have had two people that lived alone and didn't show for work and didn't call - for a couple of days. Because this was not their normal behavior, we sent a supervisor out to the house - both times the employee had died. (One had suffered a heart attack, the other had committed suicide.) These were extreme cases, but there are plenty of very good reasons always have both.

Employees' home addresses

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