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That would be a definite “fuck that shit, i’m outta here” at your first point of having a GPS bracelet on during business hours. It’s basically an electronic leash.
I guess I should clarify that I'm willing to fight this legally if warranted. I'm not going to lay down. At this point in the matter I have enough sway in the company to make my voice heard with the support of my manager. The issue being pushed is two steps above them. We have a follow up meeting next week on the matter. I was originally looking for any legal reference or grounds to declare this basically illegal. Beyond the obvious intrusion, sadly the legality doesn't follow so clearly. Companies do a great job, and hire people and pay them a lot of money, to protect the interest of the company. I'll blast them into orbit if I think I'm in the right.
ROBOT BOSSES MADE YOUR BREAKS REDUNDANT: “While we’ve been watching the horizon for the self-driving trucks, perpetually five years away, the robots arrived in the form of the supervisor, the foreman, the middle manager.
These automated systems can detect inefficiencies that a human manager never would — a moment’s downtime between calls, a habit of lingering at the coffee machine after finishing a task, a new route that, if all goes perfectly, could get a few more packages delivered in a day. But for workers, what look like inefficiencies to an algorithm were their last reserves of respite and autonomy, and as these little breaks and minor freedoms get optimized out, their jobs are becoming more intense, stressful, and dangerous...
Workers inevitably burn out, but because each task is minutely dictated by machine, they are easily replaced.... To satisfy the machine, workers felt they were forced to become machines themselves. Their chant: “We are not robots.”
...Workers are subject to intense surveillance. Their every action is tracked by warehouse scanners and call center computers, which provide the data for the automated systems that keep them working at maximum capacity.
At the most basic level, automated management starts with the schedule... The emergence of cheap sensors, networks, and machine learning allowed automated management systems to take on a more detailed supervisory role — and not just in structured settings like warehouses, but wherever workers carried their devices...
Revolutionary technology can appear mundane until it becomes the foundation for a new way of organizing work. When rate-tracking programs are tied to warehouse scanners or taxi drivers are equipped with GPS apps, it enables management at a scale and level of detail that Taylor could have only dreamed of. It would have been prohibitively expensive to employ enough managers to time each worker’s every move to a fraction of a second or ride along in every truck, but now it takes maybe one. This is why the companies that most aggressively pursue these tactics all take on a similar form: a large pool of poorly paid, easily replaced, often part-time or contract workers at the bottom; a small group of highly paid workers who design the software that manages them at the top.
This is not the industrial revolution we’ve been warned about... the specter of job-stealing AI, which is portrayed as something both fundamentally new and extraordinarily alarming... As apocalyptic visions go, it’s a uniquely flattering one for the tech industry, which is in the position of warning the world about its own success, sounding the alarm that it has invented forces so powerful they will render human labor obsolete forever. But in its civilization-scale abstraction, this view misses the ways technology is changing the experience of work, and with its sense of inevitability, it undermines concern for many of the same people who find themselves managed by machines today...
“The robot apocalypse is here,” said Joanna Bronowicka, a researcher with the Centre for Internet and Human Rights and a former candidate for European Parliament. “It’s just that the way we’ve crafted these narratives, and unfortunately people from the left and right... are using a language of the future, which obscures the actual lived reality of people right now.”
...It’s become conventional wisdom that interpersonal skills like empathy will be one of the roles left to humans once the robots take over, and this is often treated as an optimistic future. But call centers show how it could easily become a dark one: automation increasing the empathy demanded of workers and automated systems used to wring more empathy from them, or at least a machine-readable approximation of it. Angela, the worker struggling with Voci, worried that as AI is used to counteract the effects of dehumanizing work conditions, her work will become more dehumanizing still...
While an employer might have always had the right to monitor your desktop throughout the day, it probably wouldn’t have been a good use of their time. Now such surveillance is not only easy to automate, it’s necessary to gather the data needed to optimize work. The logic can appear irresistible to a company trying to drive down costs, especially if they have a workforce large enough for marginal improvements in productivity to pay off.
But workers who tolerated the abstract threat of surveillance find it far more troubling when that data is used to dictate their every move. An Amazon worker in the Midwest described a bleak vision of the future. “We could have algorithms connected to technology that’s directly on our bodies controlling how we work,” he said. “Right now, the algorithm is telling a manager to yell at us. In the future, the algorithm could be telling a shock collar—” I laughed, and he quickly said he was only partly joking. After all, Amazon has patented tracking wristbands that vibrate to direct workers, and Walmart is testing harnesses that monitor the motions of its warehouse staff...
The pace of work is only one form of the larger question these technologies will force us to confront: what is the right balance between efficiency and human autonomy? We have unprecedented power to monitor and optimize the conduct of workers in minute detail. Is a marginal increase in productivity worth making innumerable people chronically stressed and constrained to the point they feel like robots?”
For most companies and most positions in most companies, I would say the off-duty hours tracking is unenforceable. But without knowing what your company does and what your role is, I'm not going to say there's no way it would hold up in court. If your company is a contractor for the CDC, for example, and you travel at all for your work (even just locally), and your work brings you into regular physical contact with healthcare workers and/or patients and/or members of the US armed forces, then it's probably enforceable. If your work is not for a government contractor and you sit in the same office every day, you could probably prevail if you challenged the legality of this. Lots of iffy scenarios in between.
Publicly traded company with no affiliation with government contracts or aforementioned personnel. The works does include travel not only to the office but to designated work facilities as needed. Thanks for your input.
I hope you can escape this off-duty monitoring. The problem may be that some clients are requiring this, for employees of businesses that come into contact with their employees. Since it's not utterly irrational or without foundation, your employer may be able to show (at least well enough to convince a trial court) that it's important to their business activities to be able to comply with this request from one or more clients.
Personally, I'm horrified at the whole concept of electronic contact tracing, and especially the "smart" phones which many people already had, which it turns out are capable of doing this without any action or approval from the phones' owners. If your employer pushes this, I'd suggest pushing back with an alternative, like frequent testing and even more frequent temperature-taking, with the results logged and reported by you (but not with locations more precise than the county or very large city level).
I do not get paid hourly and actually get paid pretty well. My industry sometimes demands on call and my staff rotates therein. My issue is scheduled off time tracking.
I'd love to say "fuck this shit, I'm out" but my current company and position reflects a multi-decade commitment to a career hard fought. I'm on a great career path and have the sway in a management position to voice my concerns to senior management. Taking into consideration all of the response thus far, especially Deplora, I'm skipping HR and addressing my legal rep in the company. If I don't like what they say... I'm seeking outside counsel. This is bullshit.
That would be a definite “fuck that shit, i’m outta here” at your first point of having a GPS bracelet on during business hours. It’s basically an electronic leash.
I’d pit it in my dog 😂
Haha autocorrect got me again. Although my dog ate my Tracking bracelet is a time honored excuse. Works for homework every time.
Sounds very illegal but you could always just put the bracelet in a drawer at home when you were not at work.
Allow me to introduce you to Mr. Farraday
Meh, non of those arguments would work unless the employer is the state. You have to argue breach of some labor and employment law.
Or claim it’s discrimination or something.
There's no fucking way
I guess I should clarify that I'm willing to fight this legally if warranted. I'm not going to lay down. At this point in the matter I have enough sway in the company to make my voice heard with the support of my manager. The issue being pushed is two steps above them. We have a follow up meeting next week on the matter. I was originally looking for any legal reference or grounds to declare this basically illegal. Beyond the obvious intrusion, sadly the legality doesn't follow so clearly. Companies do a great job, and hire people and pay them a lot of money, to protect the interest of the company. I'll blast them into orbit if I think I'm in the right.
Just ignore it and lie to them
Just leave it in your car.
ROBOT BOSSES MADE YOUR BREAKS REDUNDANT: “While we’ve been watching the horizon for the self-driving trucks, perpetually five years away, the robots arrived in the form of the supervisor, the foreman, the middle manager.
These automated systems can detect inefficiencies that a human manager never would — a moment’s downtime between calls, a habit of lingering at the coffee machine after finishing a task, a new route that, if all goes perfectly, could get a few more packages delivered in a day. But for workers, what look like inefficiencies to an algorithm were their last reserves of respite and autonomy, and as these little breaks and minor freedoms get optimized out, their jobs are becoming more intense, stressful, and dangerous...
Workers inevitably burn out, but because each task is minutely dictated by machine, they are easily replaced.... To satisfy the machine, workers felt they were forced to become machines themselves. Their chant: “We are not robots.”
...Workers are subject to intense surveillance. Their every action is tracked by warehouse scanners and call center computers, which provide the data for the automated systems that keep them working at maximum capacity.
At the most basic level, automated management starts with the schedule... The emergence of cheap sensors, networks, and machine learning allowed automated management systems to take on a more detailed supervisory role — and not just in structured settings like warehouses, but wherever workers carried their devices...
Revolutionary technology can appear mundane until it becomes the foundation for a new way of organizing work. When rate-tracking programs are tied to warehouse scanners or taxi drivers are equipped with GPS apps, it enables management at a scale and level of detail that Taylor could have only dreamed of. It would have been prohibitively expensive to employ enough managers to time each worker’s every move to a fraction of a second or ride along in every truck, but now it takes maybe one. This is why the companies that most aggressively pursue these tactics all take on a similar form: a large pool of poorly paid, easily replaced, often part-time or contract workers at the bottom; a small group of highly paid workers who design the software that manages them at the top.
This is not the industrial revolution we’ve been warned about... the specter of job-stealing AI, which is portrayed as something both fundamentally new and extraordinarily alarming... As apocalyptic visions go, it’s a uniquely flattering one for the tech industry, which is in the position of warning the world about its own success, sounding the alarm that it has invented forces so powerful they will render human labor obsolete forever. But in its civilization-scale abstraction, this view misses the ways technology is changing the experience of work, and with its sense of inevitability, it undermines concern for many of the same people who find themselves managed by machines today...
“The robot apocalypse is here,” said Joanna Bronowicka, a researcher with the Centre for Internet and Human Rights and a former candidate for European Parliament. “It’s just that the way we’ve crafted these narratives, and unfortunately people from the left and right... are using a language of the future, which obscures the actual lived reality of people right now.”
...It’s become conventional wisdom that interpersonal skills like empathy will be one of the roles left to humans once the robots take over, and this is often treated as an optimistic future. But call centers show how it could easily become a dark one: automation increasing the empathy demanded of workers and automated systems used to wring more empathy from them, or at least a machine-readable approximation of it. Angela, the worker struggling with Voci, worried that as AI is used to counteract the effects of dehumanizing work conditions, her work will become more dehumanizing still...
While an employer might have always had the right to monitor your desktop throughout the day, it probably wouldn’t have been a good use of their time. Now such surveillance is not only easy to automate, it’s necessary to gather the data needed to optimize work. The logic can appear irresistible to a company trying to drive down costs, especially if they have a workforce large enough for marginal improvements in productivity to pay off.
But workers who tolerated the abstract threat of surveillance find it far more troubling when that data is used to dictate their every move. An Amazon worker in the Midwest described a bleak vision of the future. “We could have algorithms connected to technology that’s directly on our bodies controlling how we work,” he said. “Right now, the algorithm is telling a manager to yell at us. In the future, the algorithm could be telling a shock collar—” I laughed, and he quickly said he was only partly joking. After all, Amazon has patented tracking wristbands that vibrate to direct workers, and Walmart is testing harnesses that monitor the motions of its warehouse staff...
The pace of work is only one form of the larger question these technologies will force us to confront: what is the right balance between efficiency and human autonomy? We have unprecedented power to monitor and optimize the conduct of workers in minute detail. Is a marginal increase in productivity worth making innumerable people chronically stressed and constrained to the point they feel like robots?”
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/27/21155254/automation-robots-unemployment-jobs-vs-human-google-amazon
For most companies and most positions in most companies, I would say the off-duty hours tracking is unenforceable. But without knowing what your company does and what your role is, I'm not going to say there's no way it would hold up in court. If your company is a contractor for the CDC, for example, and you travel at all for your work (even just locally), and your work brings you into regular physical contact with healthcare workers and/or patients and/or members of the US armed forces, then it's probably enforceable. If your work is not for a government contractor and you sit in the same office every day, you could probably prevail if you challenged the legality of this. Lots of iffy scenarios in between.
Publicly traded company with no affiliation with government contracts or aforementioned personnel. The works does include travel not only to the office but to designated work facilities as needed. Thanks for your input.
I hope you can escape this off-duty monitoring. The problem may be that some clients are requiring this, for employees of businesses that come into contact with their employees. Since it's not utterly irrational or without foundation, your employer may be able to show (at least well enough to convince a trial court) that it's important to their business activities to be able to comply with this request from one or more clients.
Personally, I'm horrified at the whole concept of electronic contact tracing, and especially the "smart" phones which many people already had, which it turns out are capable of doing this without any action or approval from the phones' owners. If your employer pushes this, I'd suggest pushing back with an alternative, like frequent testing and even more frequent temperature-taking, with the results logged and reported by you (but not with locations more precise than the county or very large city level).
Forcing you to do anything outside of work means you are on their time not yours. Hopefully you get paid hourly.
I do not get paid hourly and actually get paid pretty well. My industry sometimes demands on call and my staff rotates therein. My issue is scheduled off time tracking.
I'd love to say "fuck this shit, I'm out" but my current company and position reflects a multi-decade commitment to a career hard fought. I'm on a great career path and have the sway in a management position to voice my concerns to senior management. Taking into consideration all of the response thus far, especially Deplora, I'm skipping HR and addressing my legal rep in the company. If I don't like what they say... I'm seeking outside counsel. This is bullshit.
Or make the sacrifice to just do the right thing.
But hey, you do you. It won't change unless one brave penguin jumps off that icy ledge.
[Just did it myself. Its scary as fuck to leave comfort. You can do it]
Put it in a faraday cage, or a faraday wallet to block signals