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Workplace Surveillance Becoming More Common
An anonymous reader writes For better or worse, surveillance technology is becoming more common in the workplace. These tools are being used to measure and monitor employees, with the promise changing how people work. "Through these new means, companies have found, for example, that workers are more productive if they have more social interaction. So a bank's call center introduced a shared 15-minute coffee break, and a pharmaceutical company replaced coffee makers used by a few marketing workers with a larger cafe area. The result? Increased sales and less turnover." Of course, this kind of monitoring raises privacy concerns. "Whether this kind of monitoring is effective or not, it's a concern," said Lee Tien, a senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.
...what? Did I miss something here?
Karnal
Surveillance is only the tool. How it is used (abused) is the key. For example, a camera in the break-room kills good will. Pointedly saying we will be monitoring, but not the break-room increases good will.
So these guys didn't just play Stalin, but actually acted on the data in a way that was meaningful? That's... unexpected. Mainly because such techniques are usually meant to oppress the worker, not figure out that making the workplace nicer makes the worker better. Because, you know, a nicer workplace actually costs money. We want productivity without actually spending that money. We'll spend the minimum necessary on whips, and not a 0.00000000001 bitcoin more.
By not bothering to hire experienced, decent managers.
ObComment: the technology ain't evil, the law not prohibiting using it in evil ways is evil. We know someone will always try to get away with anything permitted by the letter of the law, and then some.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Wait what, social interaction makes people more productive? You mean they don't feel like their existence is validated by the calm fuzzy warmth of fabric covered cubicle walls? They need to talk to each other too? But what if they criticize management? Managers' fragile egos can't handle even the possibility of criticism of any kind! You there! Stop talking! Eyes back on the computer screen!
Look, somebody has been leaving turds in the break room sink. At least now we'll know who it is, thanks to the cameras.
Seriously - they needed surveillance to figure out that workers were happier and more productive when they had some shared sense of purpose?
What next - needing surveillance to figure out people are bothered by random loud buzzing noises?
One day, I was puttering away on some project when the phone rang. "It was totally an accident!" "What was an accident." "I didn't mean to go to that website." "What website." "The porn site." Then it dawned on me that this woman actually thought I sat around all day watching what people were doing on their computers.
I support employers to shoot themselves in the foot 100%. Fuck YOU!
I worked for a tech support line in the mid '90s. All breaks were recorded, timed, and provided to managers on a daily basis. At a fortune 100 company in the late '90s, they had static IPS and a proxy with lots of reports. They knew who was on what how many times and when. Daily, weekly, and monthly reports.
I had a written order to install a keylogger on an employee's computer in 1999. He was suspected of using company property to commit crimes. I recorded a crime, and passed it back to the management who ordered the tap. He was fired. No charges were laid.
There is no "new" surveilance. Though it may be becoming more common, it certainly isn't new. At all.
Learn to love Alaska
When cops freak out because they are being recorded, people go all ballistic. Yes I agree that you should be able to record cops doing their job, but until they get used to it, I don't blame them for being upset.
When it's you being recorded, then that is a whole different case.
Obligatory reference to Manna
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
unions are needed before the bathroom break timer system goes into place.
I was the VP of IT for a twenty-plus year old SaaS firm with about 200 employees. I was there for three weeks when one of the interns came in and told me they forgot to install "a security update" for my new company issued laptop. He said it would force my laptop to reboot. I was in the middle of going getting acclimated to the IT budget so I said I'd install it myself later. He agreed. Later that day I inserted the flash drive and saw one binary. I right-clicked and saw the digital signature belonged to Spector 360. Red flags! Red flags!
I spoke to the VP of IS and his jaw hit the floor. We ran Wireshark on his PC and sure enough, it was constantly communicating massive amounts of encrypted data to an internal server that had no hostname. We looked through the employee handbook and there was no mention of monitoring of employee internet use. For a moment, we thought our intern was working with a competitor. But, before we went crazy with that, our next step would be to talk with my predecessor who had stayed with the company to head up a new division. He immediately clammed up and told us we needed to talk to the CEO about it. He refused to talk any further.
We went to the CEO and calmly asked about the program and what was being collected. Apparently, he had the previous VP of IT and the intern installing this software on every PC and laptop and that it was configured to capture everything: keystrokes, screen wipes, browsing history, IM history, etc. I was appalled and I knew my counterpart from IS was as well. Nevertheless, we warned him that controls needed to be in place to determine who has access to this information, under what circumstances the access is granted, etc. We emphasized the risk he was putting the company in. We were very professional and didn't even touch the creepy aspect. He said we'd all have a meeting about it in the morning. He scheduled it for 8am with me, the IS guy, the COO, company counsel, and the company president.
At 4:45PM, about an hour after we received the meeting invite, both me and the VP of IS were rounded up, taken to the CEO's office, and promptly terminated.
My contract just ended at a job where my boss was Machiavellian to say the least. We were on a very undermanned team with only four engineers, which ended up down to just three including myself after he tossed out another one of the contractors who was doing a decent job. We were maintaining a product that represents 60% of the revenue of our entire department. This guy was super paranoid and he was conducting investigations with H.R. against team members for no reason, setting up and pointing cameras at us, threatening that he can check our web history at any time, etc. He even informed us that we weren't allowed to listen to music on the job.
Also, he would "confide" in his employees about things he did not like about their fellow employees in private and then go on to complain about the person he just confided in to another employee also in private. And, he would ask them to blame each other if they slipped up on the deadline for a task even if it wasn't true, he would say "Go ahead, just blame on them. *strange laughing* You can claim they're the reason you're behind on this. *laughing again* Just say they were talking to you about unrelated work." He even gave one of my coworkers a hard time because they had to go to the hospital because of health troubles. It was very unprofessional, uncaring and probably illegal.
None of it was even necessary because we were all working very hard and had even been rewarded by the company with company funded lunch at a nice Japanese steakhouse for eliminating bugs faster than they were coming in. One day I thanked him for the lunch and he said, "Don't thank me, it was because of your great work. You earned it," and then the very next day he said he was suspicious that I had been slacking because he caught me reading the news instead of working. Who cares as long as the work is getting done and I'm beating deadlines way ahead of time.
I breathed a sigh of relief when they let me go a few weeks ago. A few days later I get a call from a staffing agent who indicated they had been told by my old boss that they specifically wanted to hire me back on to the team but at a slightly lower rate. I laughed and turned them down. The staffing agent asked why, and I said they didn't care about me and the feeling is mutual. Needless to say, he has very few people left in his team and the few still there are looking for jobs elsewhere. That team is going to implode, and he deserves it.
I was fired because I would write to my wife about the absolutely stupid things my boss and "peers" would say and do. It turns out my boss, who was completely non technical but running an IT department, was reading our email. My former boss has surrounded himself with idiotic sycophants and apparently they've had to hire 3 consultants to do the job I was doing.
He actually did me a favor. I hated working in that department, one of my peers was the owner's son and my boss was constantly sucking up to junior even though junior was my "peer". Junior is non technical too. That particular clique of management has managed to drive all the technical managers out and now they have a bunch of incompetent posers who have earned the distrust and loathing of all the people under them. They can't even make decisions on their own, they have to consult Gartner or other consultants.
I'd name names but they paid me a shit ton of money to never out them. It ended up working out well for me though. I'm making much more money and working with very smart and competent people. Sometimes more surveillance just speeds up the dysfunction that is already present in an organization.
"Through these new means, companies have found, for example, that workers are more productive if they have more social interaction."
lie, lie, lie. this is referring to the so-called open-office scheme, where they remove your privacy and sound barriers, sometimes even remove your personal desk and you are now 'fully interchangable cogs' to the company.
this has been proven to be wrong, but it keeps getting trotted out, as if repeating it over and over again will make us believe it.
CEO and bean-counter bullshit. see it for what it is.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Put an intern under her desk to eat her out whenever she wants. A satisfied worker is a very productive worker.
shorten that to:
unions are needed.
again.
sweatshops (for computer guys) are on the return. if you and I are not careful, we will be so close to the old ways, we will have to fight that old war back again. we already lost our weekends and we lost time and a half for overtime (my grandfather used to get 1.5x, 2x and 3x time for time past normal work hours). we don't get that - we're now the evil thing called 'exempt' and we get cheated out of our own time and extra pay.
add to insult the fact that all corp firewalls have a MitM proxy in them, corp windows boxes are handed out preloaded with certs installed (for the mitm firewall entry) and at some places (like where I work) its been known that spyware and remote mic/camera stuff can be activated and logged/reviewed by your boss. how do I know: because in .de they have to disclose this and my work has offices in .de ; in the US they don't disclose what they do when spying but over in .de they do).
if we dont fight back, things will continue to get worse.
oh right, we don't have unions so we are all afraid of speaking out, for sake of our jobs.
well, so we have 2 problems to solve, then.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
We are Borg. Resistance is futile.
Most programmers and people in IT in general are classified as exempt. Given the level of monitoring and control; the idea that IT people are exempt is a joke. Shift the classification to non-exempt and start paying overtime.
Says the NYT
Oh just a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, the medicine go down, etc........
Seriously - they needed surveillance to figure out that workers were happier and more productive when they had some shared sense of purpose?
Most likely those companies are simply re-discovering the Hawthorne Effect http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hawthorne_effect and exhibiting more irony than a Portland hipster considering its classic industrial psychology.
I actually work for a company that sells a SIEM tool that lends itself very nicely to monitoring of insiders. (read: employee surveillance) While most usecases are around PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and that sort of thing, invariably there are "four eyes" usecases as well. These usecases tend to bridge into the way an employee compares to their fellow employees, particularly those in the same business unit / group / job function. This tends to uncover things like people in x group come into work at 9:01a, Bill, a member of x group, comes in at 9:33a most days. Bill also tends to browse the internet on y-type sites whereas people in x group are usually active on z-type sites. Bill spends b-time with the average customer call, and takes c calls per day. Whereas x-group employees typically take 10minutes less than b-time for the average customer call, and take c+5 calls per day. SIEM tools are built to bring in most any type of data, and lots of it. Built-in correlation is normally security-centric, but is easily adapted for most anything. For example, Bill is marked as being on a business trip to Birmingham, AL but his VPN connection is coming from the FL keys *flag*. Or, more ominous, Bill said he was out at lunch with clients for an hour, but the geolocation-software installed into his phone says he was located around a car dealership, and was there for 3 hours.
We used to have these things called managers that would get on you if you spent too much time at the watering hole. The problem was that they lacked the necessary objectivity to manage properly being as they were right there. Now we can replace these unnecessary managers (who made too much $$) with surveillance technicians working in India and as far away from the workers as possible (to maintain objectivity) They can just run off a checklist that someone with a Harvard degree made up over the weekend and fire anyone doing anything not on the checklist. This will essentially eliminate the need for the human element and replace it with an algorithm (checklist) that has strategically been made to maximize productivity. Pretty soon with advances computer vision we can also replace these Indian surveillance technicians too. No more will we need to pay anyone more than $7.50 and hour, (with the exception of the MBA types who are obviously needed due the there entrepreneurial excellence) This is no doubt the way to maximize USian competitiveness and allow us to compete in the global economy. (sometimes I wonder if these brilliant ideas weren't sponsored by China or Mexico, to help us out economically)
You don't need to surveil employees to figure out they work better with a little down time, and then force a 15 minute break on them. Let them socialize naturally and judge them on their performance. No Orwellian panopticon needed. How about not treating human beings as robots? Did that thought ever occur to management? I doubt it.
Fidgeting with people's coffee makers isn't necessary either.
Of course any attempt to discuss Unions in the work place will result in instant dismissal for the employee initiating the pro-Union conversation. So mind you conversations at the work place, say nothing in any way critical of management. Say nothing about politics. Say nothing about religion. Of course if you want to get ahead, do the opposite and just make sure it aligns with the managements personal preferences.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
If women were actually making 30% less across the board and happy about it, the men would get replaced overnight. That doesn't happen. You might want to check your stats.
Police sent files to my workplace (I don't have solid enough proof), In an illegally fashion, but it's not like they're gonna be punished for that...
(relegated to a desk job or suspendend with pay)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
covered all this sort of thing.
It seems that a copy of Peopleware would cost a lot less than some Orwellian surveillance system.
Did you reach out to the general counsel after your termination?
Dear Corporate America,
Your employees will begin to resent your "15 minute department coffee breaks" as soon as they learn they were born from spying on work habits, or pulled out of the latest fad HR / Management best seller. This ranks up there with silly morale boosters like "crazy Hawaiian shirt Fridays" for a developer team that is crushing 60 hour weeks and just wants to go home.
Please accept a few thoughts on true lasting employee and corporate culture improvements:
1, end the "Corporate Daycare" mentality. Arriving at 8:05 isn't the end of the world, particularly if that employee is conscientious about staying until 5:10 to compensate. Actually, have you heard of "Flex Time" , at all? Adult professionals shouldn't be shamed for making coffee at 3:30 requiring they leave their desk for 20 minutes.
2, Realize that company-provided smartphones are essentially the same as taking your manager home with you, and stop fucking sending emails after 5pm unless it's an emergency. Stop sending meeting invites at 9pm for 9 AM meetings with the expectation that employees will see it, reply immediately and be present the next morning. Let's just tie this back to "treat people like adult professionals, the way you would like to be treated."
3, Your company suffers failure of imagination and naked greed. Make your employees participants in your companies' success. Ask them for product improvements, new product ideas, and give them more than a plaque or a parking space for coming through with groundbreaking ideas. Give them bonuses. Uncomfortably large bonuses. Watch in amazement as suddenly your employees are transformed from the cave-dwelling Morlocks from HG Wells "The Time Machine" to highly motivated people who will make the company significantly more money.
4, Value for Value. Pay people what they are worth. Treat them with respect. They will work hard for you.
5, There are artists - people who can start with a blank canvas and create a photorealistic painting from their minds' eye. There are people who can't do that, but can take a blank canvas, pencil a grid on it, and methodically reproduce the photorealistic painting with 95% accuracy. This is the difference between Richard Branson and every asshole with an MBA. Far more often than not, the largest source of employees' discontent stems from bad management. Leading and motivating people is a preternatural talent, and the people with that gift are worth sourcing and retaining at all costs. All star leadership will cut your employee churn, boost your productivity, and earn your company more money.
6, Stack Ranking, Six Sigma, when will you people realize that human beings are psychologically complicated animals and applying scientific optimization models originally designed to optimize efficiency in industrial manufacturing environments has little or no value when applied to the talking meat populating your cubicles.
Six Sigma is spectacularly effective at destroying true innovation, creativity and blue-sky thinking, and has no place outside of the factory. I'm glad everyone who attended a training seminar at the airport Hilton immediately ads "Six Sigma Level 3 Grand Wizard" in their Outlook signature to quickly identify those persons I never, ever wish to have a meaningful conversation about new product with, as part of the Six Sigma training is to destroy the part of the brain responsible for creative thinking by way of directed electrical current applied using a special helmet. Other electrodes in the helmet stimulate the part of the brain making you feel incredibly enthusiastic about applying Six Sigma to everything you imagine to be possible.
Stack Ranking is essentially the same cruel process used by 10 year olds choosing teams for kickball at recess, and often with the same level of consideration. The guy answering his company Outlook emails until 10:30 every night, who also pipes up frequently in meetings - albeit absent any meaningful contributions in either - color me surprised if that guy doesn't do well in the soul crushing quarterly Stack Rank.
Corporate America is soulless.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
Recording of a voice in Florida is often illegal. I doubt that it matters whose property it is on or whether it is an employer or not. It is a felony and the civil suit might be a real stunner.
I'm an embedded systems engineer for a company in the US, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of a large Japanese company. We enjoy comforts like alternate work schedules, telecommuting, etc. Our Japanese counterparts, however, arrive at work promptly at 8 am, spend much of each day in meetings, and then begin actual work well after noon. They work late into the night (~8:30P or later), have dinner at 10, go to bed and wake up the next day for more of the same. And, they work on Saturday. Additionally, they all wear uniforms -- it's like watching prisoners march to the mess hall when it's time for their collective department lunch break, given at 45 minute intervals.
Not only are they not as productive, their creativity is obviously stifled. Aside from the cultural norm of not wanting to rock the boat or "think outside the box", they are simply unable to innovate and create the same way we are. Indeed, when they need some creative problem solving, they come here to the US for brainstorming sessions. And, the frustrating thing is, I get the impression that they feel their way is superior. Not so. They live to work, while we work to live.
sig: sauer
1. It is fun to spy on others. It is not fun to be spied upon.
2. You exert power and authority by spying on others, and by forcing them to accept surveillance.
3. People, if they know someone's spying on them, will find ways to thwart or subvert surveillance. Spying then becomes an arms race between those who want to observe and those who resist being observed.
Being fired for union talk is a no no and the logs will prove that.
Unfortunately without accountability humans tend to make some poor choices. As an employer, why would I put up with paying somebody whose 5-min hourly smoke/coffee breaks slink towards 11-min? As a nonsmoking/noncoffeedrinking coworker, why should I be paid the same as the guy who works for 49 and breaks for 11? Now perhaps that guy is more efficient or more effective with hourly 11-min breaks, but that's the subject of a separate study. Without accountability it's easy to spend more and more minutes surfing slashdot and facebook between emails and coding. As with everything, of course, there needs to be a middle ground.
My employer was trying to deal with another of their decades long political scandals and cast a wide net by ordering all employees to surrender their company email info. I was given a short code to enter that gave SDDPC access to my email and I had nothing to hide besides flirting with a chemist and the usual talk between co-workers. My friend Rob would contact his friends and family in Austria via email. So... a few people were caught up in the political mess but Rob had downloaded porn on the the company PC and was fired. Idiot. I never used the Co. email for personal stuff again.
The unknown effect involves the mysterious overlords.
Seriously, they need to spy on employees to figure out that attention spans are finite, fatigue limits effectiveness and water cooler chat revitalizes the mind? Perhaps espionage will also help directors discover that sick leave reduces illness. It may be bloody obvious to even those of us who are borderline human, but apparently it will take hidden cameras and infrared imaging for senior management to figure it out.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Nobody will be fired for talking about unions. They will be performance managed out of the position over a period of months.
The only place where you can't easily be fired is the public sector, and that's why they pay so badly.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
It's simple. It's easy. It's absolutely impossible for 99% of the companies out there to implement it.
Your most sensitive, most accurate and by some margin absolutely cheapest (because it comes with zero additional cost) surveillance and monitoring system you have is your staff. This of course has a few requirements. First and foremost, it would require you to trust your staff more than you trust your 1000-bucks-an-hour consultant who will tell you that this won't fly (mostly because you wouldn't need him at all if you opted for it and he'd lose a very comfortable and easy job that is paid far better than it ever had to be). Second, it requires your staff to trust you (that their input isn't just redirected to /dev/null without delay). And finally it requires you to actually get out of your crystal palace and down onto the ground floor to talk to them.
If these three requirements are not a problem to you, you're in for a cheap and very rewarding source of information.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"with the promise changing how people work."
There's a reason that mechanical engineers don't try to make things fit together "perfectly". Everything needs slack, wiggle room, tolerance. Or it breaks down.
Yeah . . . no thanks. I don't need anyone negotiating my salary on my behalf. I don't need some deadweight lazy incompetent being promoted ahead of me just because they've been at the company forever. And as a manager, I sure don't need to lose the important ability to fire a worker who just isn't working out. If I don't like my job or my employer, I will simply leave and find a new one. This is technology, not bureaucracy . . . please don't try to ruin it for the rest of us.
"Of course, this kind of monitoring raises privacy concerns."
What privacy concerns would those be? You have no expectation of privacy at work except when on the phone or emailing with your spouse, doctor, lawyer, or other professional where there is a statutory privilege (which may or may not be permitted anyway, depending on employer policy regarding personal use of company resources).
The company has every right to monitor how its resources are being used. Employees who misuse company resources are committing Honest Services Fraud, which is a Felony.
All that managers know how to do is set the dollar amount of the bonus they want for the year and fire people until they can meet that number. Why bother with all this paranoid monitoring? All this data won't affect the outcome of anything.
""Whether this kind of monitoring is effective or not, it's a concern," ?
No, it's not. You have a choice - to not work for someplace.
Gosh, you might have to *gasp* TRAIN them to be better workers! Can't have that! Much better to toss them out like used toilet paper.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
There's a nonzero risk that at 4:46 everyone competent on the field would know about certain pros and cons of working in that company. Good job, management.
Unions are a double edged sword on the positive they do tend to protect against some of this stuff. On the negative they are expensive to maintain and that money comes out of the employee's check every week. Also they tend to rob you of flexibility.
My brother is a union member and because of that union contract there are some things he simply doesn't have to put up with. On the other hand because of that union contract he can't have alternative work schedules, he can't negotiate different duties with his boss, and in general he has far less flexibility than a non-union employee. My brother gets irritated because the union is dominated by a lot of employees who fear change so he can't get some of the things he wants because the majority votes against it. So realize if you accept the union you are agreeing to basically let your co-workers have a vote on your career decisions because those decisions will be made collectively rather than on an individual basis. Whether this is a good or bad thing is going to depend upon who you are, what industry you are in, whether there are better deals to be had and how likely you are to be able to negotiate one of those deals for yourself. If you are a top 10% employee for example odds are a union is going to be bad for you. If you are more of a midrange employee or someone who isn’t comfortable negotiating for yourself, and will thus never get those available deals, the union may be good for you.
Another aspect of giving up your own autonomy to gain the protection of a union is that you may be called upon to go on strike. This has happened to my brother twice in his career and both times it was a real hardship as their strike fund doesn't totally replace your paycheck. You also end up picketing when they tell you to even if it is raining in January.
No. We're a "work at will" state, so they can fire anyone for any reason at any time. The VP of IS was there for two years prior to my arrival. That they callously tossed the guy out because he became aware of the CEO's little spying operation shows you how much respect the executive gilded class have for their employees.
And the name of that company is...?
You should report this company's behavior on Glassdoor.com, so that prospective employees can know what they're up to. Glassdoor.com allows you to make anonymous reviews of companies, as an employee (or ex-employee), so you don't have to leave your name there.
A few months ago, I backed out of a job interview based on many reviews I read on Glassdoor.com. The company was Extron Electronics (they have two locations, one in the Bay Area and one in NJ near Princeton). I was lined up for an interview with them for a software engineering position, through a 3rd-party recruiter, but the recruiter mentioned some oddities about this company; I guess they had other candidates back out too. So I got on Glassdoor.com, read the reviews, and found out that this company has strict working hours, reprimands employees for leaving early (regardless of when they arrive), HR drives around the parking lot to see who's hanging out in their cars, and worst of all they have cameras monitoring the bathroom entrances so they can track how long employees spend in the restroom, and reprimand them for taking too long in there. After reading all this, I called up the recruiter and cancelled the interview. I'd rather go on welfare and move to the ghetto than work in such a place. Strangely, after this happened, I got two more calls from the HR lady at Extron (whom many interviewers on Glassdoor.com mentioned specifically as "Iron Lady" or something like that) trying to bypass the recruiter and get me to come in for an interview.
By Ford, without monitoring, however else will you sort the Betas from the Deltas?
Question, though: In the 15 minute forced socialization breaks, do they pass a Loving Cup?
"Bill said he was out at lunch with clients for an hour, but the geolocation-software installed into his phone says he was located around a car dealership, and was there for 3 hours."
That sounds like horrible software if the managers don't know to take it with a grain of salt. GPS isn't accurate down to the foot, and there are restaurants located beside car dealerships. Plus, he could have dropped his car off for service, left his phone in his car, and gone to lunch wtih clients.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Yeah . . . no thanks. I don't need anyone negotiating my salary on my behalf. I don't need some deadweight lazy incompetent being promoted ahead of me just because they've been at the company forever. And as a manager, I sure don't need to lose the important ability to fire a worker who just isn't working out. If I don't like my job or my employer, I will simply leave and find a new one. This is technology, not bureaucracy . . . please don't try to ruin it for the rest of us.
Oh yes, teh evilz of the unions.
Tell you what. Go back to a 12 hour six day work week, give back your sick leave, healthcare and vacation.
You won't though will ya? Because while you hate the unionz, and the lazy commies and n'er do wells that they are, you don't have the fortitude to give back anything they've ever done for you? Any union hater of any ethics at all would never ever take advantage of tainted acquisitions.
Hypocrite.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Blah blah, at the small price of losing all privacy, we can now learn obvious things like,
if we don't treat people like slaves and give them a bit free time to socialize they work better.
Shocking!
i'd say kindergarten is needed.
for you.
to learn basic writing.
skills.
Surveillance is ok if it is to prevent theft of material goods. Sometimes, when I worked, my brain ran dry of new ideas to solve some problems. I turned to distractions such as joke websites, or Slashdot, and perhaps a short time later, ideas came to mind.
If I need a quiet place to use the cell, in a business where all exits / entrances are badge monitored, I would use the toilet or the shipping dock, or the company cafeteria (which was also under in-security access..
If you company is that worried, are they working for the NSA? Are you working in a munitions plant or a germ warfare company? Its time to get out from those employers
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
No. We're a "work at will" state, so they can fire anyone for any reason at any time.
This kind of thing is why James Madison added the 9th Amendment to the Bill of Rights, and didn't restrict it to just limiting Congress (unlike, for example, the 1st Amendment).
The 9th Amendment is there to provide a mechanism to allow people to assert rights against state and local governments as well as against the federal government, and to have those rights supersede the state and local law. In joining the union, the states are bound by this, and local governments come along with state government.
Madison knew from his own legal experience that state governments would attempt to violate fundamental rights. He went to bat for the Methodists against the state of Virginia attempting -- in violation of its own Bill of Rights -- to force them to pay to support the Anglican church. He won (and this victory would later pave the way to getting him elected to Congress in the predominantly Methodist districts his home was located near, in spite of massive gerrymandering by senior Virginia state officials intended to keep him out of Congress).
In this case, one could assert a right to not, in general, be spied upon by one's employer. Such a right respects basic human dignity, and thus can be considered a fundamental right. It is part of the right to privacy.
In some circumstances, infringement of this right could be justified (all rights have limits), but the circumstances under which this could be done would have to be carefully worked out (not just with respect to when surveillance could happen, but what could be done with the data). If private entities can arbitrarily violate fundamental rights, then they can become a tool for government to violate fundamental rights, and thus the protection of these rights against government necessarily involves limiting many private entities as well.
Here, as is so often the case, the challenge in fighting this kind of thing is not in defining right and wrong (the company was clearly in the wrong, if the facts described are correct), but in getting the legal profession to remember that they swore oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights, and act appropriately.
thank you. thank you for calling out that idiot.
I GOT MINE, FARK YOU. that's his attitude.
and you know what? I bet that he's a young-un. full of self pride and a know-it-all. he has a good job, he's groomed and he thinks highly of himself. he thinks his job is secure.
I know this very well. I was like that when I was a 20something and even 30something.
I'm now a 50something and I know better. I KNOW we need help negotiating fair wages and benefits. in fact, I'm now forced to be a contractor for the first 6mos (of almost every job I end up taking) and that means the company gets to avoid paying what they used to - healthcare, vacation, sick time. I am now forced to foot the bill for those during the first 6mos. then, MAYBE, I get converted to fulltime. maybe.
the only good thing about that guy is: he'll soon learn. when he's a greyhair he'll find out he's a 2nd or 3rd class citizen and he'll be forced to be a contractor like I am, forced to come in sick since he can't afford to lose an 8 hour pay day. he'll sing a different tune.
but right now, he's arrogant as fucking hell. and too young to know how stupid he really is.
he'll get his. maybe 10 or 20 yrs but he'll get his. I know this for a fact.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
thank you. thank you for calling out that idiot.
I GOT MINE, FARK YOU. that's his attitude..
Union haters are like AntiVaxxers.
"Why should people get vaccinations? No one gets those diseases any more!"
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.