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Big Brother In the Home Office
hessian writes with this excerpt from the New York Times' "Bits" column: "Tens of thousands of programmers, writers, accountants and other workers labor at home doing contract work for companies like Google, Hewlett-Packard and NBC. The computers they use contain software that takes snapshots of what they are doing six times an hour. The snooping occurs randomly, making it impossible for the computer user to game the system. It is probably more invasive than what happens to those working in offices, where scooting through Facebook entries, shopping on Cyber Monday, and peeping at N.S.F.W. ('Not Safe for Work') Web sites on corporate computers is both normal and rarely observed by managers."
It's not just about making sure you're doing nothing private, but also to make sure you didn't take a half-hour to have a cup of coffee or take your hand off your keyboard to think about the best way to solve a problem.
Is it finally sinking in that corporations really don't care about your well-being, or even about what's best for the company, only profits are important? And if achieving another .2% of profits this quarter requires you to have a 50% worse quality of life, they're going to throw you under the bus every time.
Problem is, there is absolutely no "free market" solution to this. There is no "free market" solution to your declining real income and your diminishing quality of life. They are thrilled with high unemployment because that means the workers are too scared to do anything but bow their heads and take it.
Today I read an article in Bloomberg about how so many working and middle class people aren't doing quite as badly as we thought because they're taking second jobs for cash and more mothers and kids are working to pick up a little extra cash so they can survive month to month. And the article said that this was all a good thing. No mention of the corrosive social effect of people with two full-time jobs sleeping a lot less, or more kids not having any parents at home until late into the evening. No mention of the fact that the second jobs tend to be at or below the minimum wage. No mention of health care costs increasing because of additional stress.
There was actually a quote about how working 16 hour days for $8 bucks and hour is just as good as working 8 hours a day for $16/hr. They pointed out that the diminishing place of organized labor has made these wonderful "productivity innovations" possible.
Sometimes I have trouble believing how quickly we went from being a nation where people commonly believed that their children would have better lives to a nation where there is certainty that our children will have worse lives. In my lifetime we have gone from a country where the working and middle classes believed that if they just worked hard and took care of their families that they would have a few good years of retirement to enjoy, to a country where everybody knows that the 401k is only going to hold us for a year or two, and then...well then we just don't know (and that's if you could afford to put away money for that 401k). When all those 401k babies start to retire and they realize there's no where near enough money to live there is going to be social displacement like we've never seen.
We have become a feudal oligarchy where it's considered a great thing that a skilled worker - a professional - can be monitored every ten minutes to make sure they don't get up to go to the bathroom or change their toddler's diaper. This is "thinking outside the box". These are "innovative management tools".
By the way, when Hewlett Packard (one of the companies using this 10 minute monitoring system) fired their former CEO Leo Apotheker for not really doing that great of a job, they made sure his transition was eased by $7 million cash and $18 million in stock. This is the CEO that they fired while telling their workers that they all have to tighten their belts. Oh, and they structured the "firing" so that Mr Apotheker could file for unemployment.
You are welcome on my lawn.