Hi. My employment was recently terminated and I have lodged an application with Fair Work Australia.
I was not given any opportunity to access my email account to extract personal email folders. It was a unique industry and without going into detail, I was poached by one employer and we moved to another building, but with the same services provider, providing building access, telephones and IT services amongst other things. Therefore, I took the same email address from my previous position to the next position.
Within this email account, I had various personal folders, including a mortgage, refinance documents and information, various personal documents and information. There were absolutely no email or internet policies in place. Working 5 days a week, 9 to 5, and expecting this employment to be until retirement (naive in hindsight), it seemed practical to just keep a personal folder in my work email so that I had no need to use personal email while at work, which I very rarely did, and I would be notified of important emails and able to respond in a timely manner, being altered to incoming emails immediately and dealing with them within appropriate timeframes.
If I had used my personal email address for some of these matters, I would have been out of time due to not seeing them and dealing with them while at work. I had this email address for approximately 7 years, so quite a lot of personal information is contained in this account.
Is there anything under Employment Law that says I cannot do this? Can I expect to be able to retrieve these important emails which are in no way damaging to my former employer? If so, how would I go about it? I really don't know what my former employer's attitude would be, given that they would probably be aware of the Unfair Dismissal Application I have lodged by this stage.
Thanks in anticipation
I was not given any opportunity to access my email account to extract personal email folders. It was a unique industry and without going into detail, I was poached by one employer and we moved to another building, but with the same services provider, providing building access, telephones and IT services amongst other things. Therefore, I took the same email address from my previous position to the next position.
Within this email account, I had various personal folders, including a mortgage, refinance documents and information, various personal documents and information. There were absolutely no email or internet policies in place. Working 5 days a week, 9 to 5, and expecting this employment to be until retirement (naive in hindsight), it seemed practical to just keep a personal folder in my work email so that I had no need to use personal email while at work, which I very rarely did, and I would be notified of important emails and able to respond in a timely manner, being altered to incoming emails immediately and dealing with them within appropriate timeframes.
If I had used my personal email address for some of these matters, I would have been out of time due to not seeing them and dealing with them while at work. I had this email address for approximately 7 years, so quite a lot of personal information is contained in this account.
Is there anything under Employment Law that says I cannot do this? Can I expect to be able to retrieve these important emails which are in no way damaging to my former employer? If so, how would I go about it? I really don't know what my former employer's attitude would be, given that they would probably be aware of the Unfair Dismissal Application I have lodged by this stage.
Thanks in anticipation