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Fingerprint Requirement For a Work-Study Job?
BonesSB writes "I'm a student at a university in Massachusetts, where I have a federal work-study position. Yesterday, I got an email from the office that is responsible for student run organizations (one of which I work for) saying that I need to go to their office and have my fingerprints taken for the purposes of clocking in and out of work. This raises huge privacy concerns for me, as it should for everybody else. I am in the process of contacting the local newspaper, getting the word out to students everywhere, and talking directly to the office regarding this. I got an email back with two very contradictory sentences: 'There will be no image of your fingerprints anywhere. No one will have access to your fingerprints. The machine is storing your prints as a means of identifying who you are when you touch it.' Does anybody else attend a school that requires something similar? This is an obvious slippery slope, and something I am not taking lightly. What else should I do?"
" I am in the process of contacting the local newspaper, getting the word out to students everywhere"
Do yourself a favor and hold off on that. All I can think of while reading your submission is one of those tea baggers holding up a sign that reads "MORAN."
No one is forcing you to.
Actually, you stupid fuck, they are forcing him to. That work study job, and most of the educational system, is funded by tax dollars, which are forcibly extracted from productive workers. When he graduates into the real world and has wages and assets that can be expropriated by a bullshit incompetent gangster government, they will force him to pay in the exact same way, regardless of whether he submits to their Orwellian privacy violations or not.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Look, a free market is what is good, pure, and true.
If you don't like the terms, don't apply or comply. This has no bearing on anyone else. In the end, it will work itself out.
If you make a stink but don't *really* do anything about it, it's an exercise in futility. If you're hoping to do a work-study for an organization for which it would be a significant risk to employ a convicted felon (or comparable point of contention), perhaps you should look at alternative options.
There is no "right" to work.
Suck it up and deal with it.
If you contact a local news or student organization, do you think your potential employer will be happy? You've already decided you don't want this job by doing that. If you don't want the job, then what's the problem? Walk away. Nobody is making you do it. Making a big scene is childish.
Yes, but this being Slashdot it is critical to play up the paranoia aspect for all its worth. Don't let facts get in the way of a good tinfoil-hat conspiracy rant. We must maintain the illusion that any and all privacy will be lost forever if any employer uses a fingerprint time clock.