Via Ars, this disturbing story:
After researching the app and speaking with a trainer from Xora, Plaintiff and her co-workers asked whether Intermex would be monitoring their movements while off duty. Stubits admitted that employees would be monitored while off duty and bragged that he knew how fast she was driving at specific moments ever since she installed the app on her phone. Plaintiff expressed that she had no problem with the app's GPS function during work hours, but she objected to the monitoring of her location during non-work hours and complained to Stubits that this was an invasion of her privacy. She likened the app to a prisoner's ankle bracelet and informed Stubits that his actions were illegal. Stubits replied that she should tolerate the illegal intrusion…..
Now, this suit may very well prove that what the employer did here was illegal. Most people, I think, would recognize this as being completely and utterly morally wrong, whatever the end result of the lawsuit. But the fact that this person's boss obviously thought it was acceptable is very disturbing. Because this is just the latest example of employers treating employees as if they are not entirely human.
I have discussed this in a slightly different context, but at the low end of the employment scale, some employers are already trying to remove the humanity from their employees:
It highlights how certain retailers attempt to control their employees every interaction with customers, leveraging modern technology to implement the MBA inspired dream of employees that do nothing other than what the employee handbook and sales rules allow.
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Amazon, for example, does its best to treat human as if they were flesh robots tagging them with personal navigation devices and dictating the routes through their fulfillment centers.
I have worked in warehouses. It is hard, occasionally backbreaking (I worked for a comic distributor who did not have an unloading doc. Unloading the semis was a laborious process of breaking down the pallets and tossing the boxes of comics from one end of the truck to another and then down to the guys with the roll carts to transport the boxes into the warehouse itself. If you ever got a bent comic book in the midwest, umm, sorry.) but it as also a lot of fun. You started with a truck to load or unload, and when you were done, the truck went on its merry way. But no one treated me as an automaton, and we occasionally came up with better ways to do a specific task. We had some measure of humanity, something that is being taken away from a lot of employees.
It seems to be a form of madness. Ironically, the worker in question was apparently a very good employee. And her manager should have been able to tell. How? She had a sales quota and she apparently met that quota. The fact that her boss was too dim to recognize a good employee and felt the need to be this intrusive is not only a moral failing but also a managerial one. Speaking as someone who has managed people, it is generally fairly easy to tell if they are good employees, no matter the level of direct monitoring you have: the work you assign them gets done to the level of quality you specify. It is really not that hard.
Someone once said that the business definition of efficiency was doing a small, specific task in zero seconds with zero variance forever. Now, with certain kinds of technology, some companies seem intent on reaching that goal. And it is just logical that as they colonize your work life, that they would colonize every aspect of your life. Once you stop treating humans as humans, it becomes easier and easier to justify colonizing their entire life. they work for me: I should be able to demand they work for no one else; I should know if they are taking care of themselves so that they can be the best employee they can be; I should know where they are in case I need them, etc, etc, etc. The road from employer-employee to master-servant is, apparently, a short one in our connected age.
But employees are, of course, not servants. They are agree to do some work for some level of compensation. Given the capitalistic nature of our society, it should never be allowed that they must give up their basic humanity in order to feed themselves. People who argue that employees must give up anything that their employer demands or leave have a severely faulty understanding of both the relative power dynamics at play (a company need not eat; an employee must) and what it means to be a human being. People are not mere economic transactions, and there are some things that should not be allowed to be sold or bargained. To the extent that technology facilitates such erosions of appropriate lines, the law should step in and restrain it.
UPDATE: Wow, rec list; thanks for the kind votes. Also, thanks for everyone who caught the error in the title. I have now fixed it.