Among the many other convulsions wrought by the coronavirus, office workers find themselves on the brink of a brave new workplace. Compared to the plight of workers deemed essential to the economy—who are supplying desperately needed health care, groceries, and government services in adverse conditions for all-too-low wages and negligible benefits—the travails of stay-at-home office drones are a comparative luxury. Still, the measure of autonomy such workers may gain by virtue of Zooming, emailing, and report-filing amid the comforts of home is largely an illusion, as New Republic staff writer Nick Martin notes. While socially distanced employees may be able to take some limited advantage of small snatches of off-site downtime, their bosses are never far from their minds—or their keyboards, phones, and computer cameras, it turns out.
A recent dispatch by New York Times technology reporter Adam Satariano showed how the invasion of the home workplace has advanced during the Covid-19 lockdown. Work-tracking software lurked through all his online activity, while surveilling his homebound whereabouts for good measure. Nor, under the rights-starved model of work that prevails in most companies, is this any great departure from the norm. “Workers know they are being watched,” said Dave Nevogt, CEO of the firm that produced the employee-monitoring software that Satariano used. “So it does not violate privacy.”
Except that it does—especially since workers are unlikely to be informed of any additional boss-sanctioned forays into their notionally private lives. A recent Wall Street Journal report on how virtual workforces are now adopting coronavirus-tracing software notes that there aren’t any functional limits set on its subsequent use. Martin writes:
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 latest strain of total boss surveillance may seem shocking, but it is nothing new. Well before the pandemic rendered a major segment of the American workforce homebound, bosses had already been eagerly tracking the activities and productivity of their employees. Amazon warehouses are notorious high-tech panopticons in the service of Dickens-style worker deprivation. And more broadly, there’s a diminishing number of workplaces that operate out of range of a boss’s virtual prying eyes:
A 2018 study by Gartner found that of the 239 companies it surveyed, half 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 incentivized 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.
Words to ponder as you leave this newsletter to update a spreadsheet or proofread a report. And maybe when you’re done, you can tell your boss to log off altogether—and get busy doing something less untoward, and genuinely important.
—Chris Lehmann, Editor |
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