The Rise of the All-Seeing Boss
- Spoiler:
The role of the office may be changing forever, but don't think your snooping employer isn't changing along with it.
By Nick Martin
May 7, 2020
I’m working from home while writing this. Maybe you’re working from home while reading this. For the workers in this country lucky enough to have jobs that don’t require a commute or in-person contact right now, the home office (or “office” created haphazardly in some corner of the home) has become a new normal. And while that time has been a chance for many to reconsider whether their physical presence is a crucial aspect of their job—the kind of flexibility long denied to workers who needed it pre-pandemic—it should also be an opportunity to think about what other shifts might be coming our way.
Outside of the pandemic, studies have shown that working from home increases productivity, worker happiness, and leisure time. From afar, the move to this model could be seen as a long-overdue silver lining of an otherwise cruel pandemic. But, because bosses remain bosses and the four-day workweek and days of worker-owned-and-led companies seem too far away, our jobs—even when done from home—will remain as coercive as ever. This includes an expansion of the worker surveillance state that already exists, as over-zealous managers demand to see each and every physical and digital move their employers make. Adam Satariano, the European technology correspondent for The New York Times, laid out this new reality by installing the employee-monitoring software used by bosses on his computer and phone.
The software snapped screenshots of the websites he was on, recorded his physical location and productivity levels, and sent daily reports of all this information—as well as a screenshot of an online workout—to his manager, who agreed that the degree of surveillance was creepy. But according to Dave Nevogt, the CEO of the software company, this is not creepy because, “Workers know they are being watched, so it does not violate privacy.”
This tracks with what many companies are looking to do as American businesses prematurely reopen. The Washington Post reported that companies like the trade publication the High Plains Journal are requiring employees to create avatars for a digital office and to have their webcams on around the clock. The Wall Street Journal—which at the beginning of the pandemic sent out a message to its own employees demanding they be constantly accessible— found that companies are contracting with app companies that promise to trace the movements of their employees and categorize them by their potential risk for contracting and spreading the coronavirus. But these micromanaging measures will almost assuredly remain once the pandemic has subsided. Jason Schultz, a professor of clinical law at New York University, stated the obvious for the Journal: “Employers don’t really have any incentives to remove surveillance once they install it.”
This degree of tracking already exists at companies like Amazon, which have long had tracking measures baked into their daily warehouse operations, going so far as to time bathroom breaks. These practices, which have remained in place during the pandemic, have only further magnified the company’s disdain for its workers. This, along with Amazon’s failure to adequately consider the health and safety of its factor workers, has led to sickouts and protests, a direct action rejecting the hustle-or-die culture the company has exploited to build its fortunes.
But the all-seeing company has been part of our work culture in other ways, too: A 2018 study by Gartner found that of the 239 companies they surveyed, half of them were collecting data on their employees, either by combing the text of their texts and emails, tracking their meetings, or collecting biometric data. Some companies, like Aetna, even financially incentived their employees to get a good night’s rest by encouraging them to use apps to track how long they slept at night. This has led some of these companies to pursue apps that would then track a worker’s health in relation to their productivity. Money is the end goal to all of these creepy wellness pursuits—either by squeezing more out of the workers or by lowering the company’s share of health care costs. Privacy is, all too conveniently, just a cost of doing business.
As my colleague Osita Nwanevu wrote last month, the pandemic has been and will continue a tremendous test for organized labor. As workers navigate this new normal, whenever it arrives, we will have to be persistent and creative in how we reject calls for constant monitoring. A new era of direct action and worker collectivity will arise online as it has in-person; mass walk-outs will be replaced with mass log-offs. There’s an opportunity in the pandemic to remake how we work, as Sarah Jaffe wrote here last week. But it goes both ways. Clearly bosses are seizing the moment, too.
Basically, an admission that Uber's key innovation was to skirt labor law. https://t.co/JGoPErJpga
— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) August 12, 2020
Vlada je još jednom briljirala po pitanju zapošljavanja mladih. „Moja prva plata“, Vladin program koju sprovodi Nacionalna služba za zapošljavanje, osim upitne zakonitosti, firmama obezbeđuje jeftinu radnu snagu za cenu ispod minimalca.
Prema objašnjenju na zvaničnoj internet stranici, Vladin program „Moja prva plata“ ima za cilj da podstakne zapošljavanje mladih i pruži podršku privredi u rešavanju problema s nedostatkom kadrova, a šansu da provedu devet meseci na radu u nekoj od firmi u Srbiji dobiće 10.000 mladih tek svršenih srednjoškolaca i diplomaca.
Međutim, upitno je šta podstiče i koje probleme rešava ovaj program za koji Vlada izdvaja dve milijarde dinara iz javnog budžeta.
Mario Reljanović, stručnjak za oblast radnih prava, je za Danas prokomentarisao da je nejasna pravna osnova uredbe na kojoj se Vladin program zasniva, kao i vrsta ugovora na osnovu kojih će polaznici progama obavljati praksu kod poslodavca.
A company called Civvl says evicting people is the "FASTEST GROWING MONEY MAKING GIG DUE TO COVID-19."
bemty wrote:klinac gleda video o self-care koji je napravila uciteljica. jedi zdravu hranu, idi napolje radi vezbe, uzivaj u umetnickom izrazu. a snima polu-oporavljena od korone, sa podocnjacima do kolena, nocu, jer preko dana predaje uzivo deci ciji roditelji su nuzni za funkcionisanje drzave i zdravstva, popodne sprema online materijale za ostatak bulumente, a uvece pregleda zadatke i salje feedback. a usput brine i o potrebama ucenika cije porodice su lose okruzenje za dete, kao i porodicama koje su previse siromasne da ih prehrane. ali zato jede voce!
Zanimljiv vebinar u organizaciji Fridriha, Eberta i onog trećeg fondacije; osim Pogačarya izdvajam predstavnicu Naleda koja je komentarišući radnike Glovoa, CarGoa i sličnih platformi koji rade po 12 sati rekla kako i lekari rade po 20 sati pa "sve treba staviti u neku perspektivu koja je realna".
...We’re living through a historical moment when the piling on of more work and more productivity has become pointless, absurd, or positively dangerous—when we “work” tirelessly at failed marriages, demand that academics “add value” to the human capital that comes within range of the classroom, “reward” cops for more collars as crime rates decline, and produce more atmospheric toxins in the name of “energy independence.”
Why do we still think that a job well done is our goal in life? Why do we locate our identities in the production of goods, as against the consumption of goods?
More to the point, why does the left want to restore the ego boundaries determined by the emotional austerity and psychological renunciations that work requires and reproduces? Why reinstate the ego ideal of the bourgeois individual, rather than ask—as both Weber and Freud did—whether it’s adequate to our present historical condition?
Intellectuals on the left still conceive of work in the same way that Luther, Hegel, and Marx did, as the “essence” of human nature, as the setting in which genuine selfhood is enacted. How else to explain their devotion to the transcendent value of socially necessary labor? In this crucial sense, the left, no less than the right, is still committed to the bourgeois virtues—and to their material framework, a self-regulating market where no firm is “too big to fail.” The right has fetishized love as sanctified by marriage and the family: keep working at it! The left has fetishized work as such. As always, Freud’s exaggerations about love and work have come true, thus confirming Adorno’s judgment of psychoanalysis—that only its hyperbole was accurate.
The question is, what happens if we dispense with this bourgeois conception of work and the ego ideal that attends it? Instead of repatriating work from overseas, or reclaiming factory labor from the robots on the shop floor, or increasing public spending to create full employment, what if we said, fuck work? Or, more politely: “We prefer not to. Work and life are not the same thing. And now that work matters less in the making of our character because socially necessary labor is, practically speaking, unavailable, we can create lives less burdened by its demands.”
...
Breaking the spell of the Protestant ethic
It's not even the elite half the time. A lot of it is better paid wage slaves who want others to suffer because they had to as well. People are in such competition with each other that there really isn't any need for the mega rich to bother with us that much.
Home
паће
by паће Thu Dec 26, 2019 11:13 am