Last week, we reported that silicon valley tech companies were calling their employees back to their offices. Some companies, including Twitter, Salesforce, Meta (formerly Facebook), have blown the phrase "we can't go back to the office" in order to recruit people during the epidemic... Now I still regret it.
Of course, in the face of the reality of the "lying flat" of the epidemic in the United States, some remote/mixed offices will still maintain the state of wanting to be for a long time - but if you think that telecommuting can be "do whatever you want" to a large extent, then you are "light enemy":
According to a survey report, employers are looking for ways to use various technical means to monitor employees in the remote work era.
Coworker.org, a nonprofit from the United States focused on employee rights, collected data on more than 550 technology products in labor management and interviewed many users and potential audiences of these products. The survey found that the vast majority of these products are "Bossware", that is, office/supervision software that mainly serves the boss, rather than developed to help employees.
The agency recently published a data report, Titled Little Tech Is Coming for Workers, that shows the rise and proliferation of such office/overcrowding software, especially during the pandemic, and the ways in which they harm employees, labor standards, and the economy.
A respondent who worked at a telephone call center in the United States and became a full-time Uber and Lyft driver because he lost his job during the epidemic said:
"When I had to use these techniques at work, I felt that they lacked personalization. When I used these software to apply for relief from the company because I was fired, I felt like they weren't taking me personally. ”
Image source: Coworker.org
In addition to the report, Coworker.org also made the data used during all surveys publicly available on its website, making it a queryable database.
The first look at this database surprised the Silicon Star people: to monitor the various behaviors and status of employees, the tools available could not be more and more comprehensive.
1) Work performance/efficiency monitoring: including closed-circuit television monitoring, geographical location monitoring, telephone records, social media, employee private activity monitoring, etc.;
2) Work safety: including body temperature monitoring, AI-based manual labor safety prediction, etc
3) Work benefits: including automated (non-manual) processing of wage and benefit requests, physical and mental health applications, etc.;
4) Job market and labor optimization: including workplace data monitoring, automated (non-manual) dismissal, labor data purchase in the gig economy market, etc
While these categories may seem fine, in fact, the monitoring behavior of some software has reached a very serious level of harassment of employees' personal privacy.
For example, the punch card software can track the GPS positioning of remote employees - this is no problem, but some software will go further, set up GPS fences according to the home address of employees, and warn if they go out for too long; there are also records of employee keyboard input, and even record whether employees have carried out a lot of copy and paste operations, and will also record private communication records on office equipment...
Let's use an example from a company called Beekeeper in the database:
From the website, the company claims that its product is "essential software for frontline (non-civilian) employees", which can make employee communication smoother and more efficient.
But in reality, beekeeper's real core selling point (at least for the boss who pays the bill) is its ability to record and analyze how quickly employees read and respond to boss messages.
Major customers, including pizza delivery brand Domino's, Hilton Hotels Group, London Heathrow Airport and others, are mandatorily installed on employees' equipment and required to use. The company's investors include a number of public and private institutions in Switzerland, as well as large institutional investors such as Samsung Ventures.
In fact, it can be seen from the product name: Beekeeper beekeeper is not to help the boss better manage this group of hard-working little bees.
Many of these types of software, which are monitored by employees in the name of office efficiency, belong to small, unknown companies. Coworker.org the report named them "Little Tech" for this reason.
But because the products offered by these companies are very precise and the benefits to employers are very clear, such companies have performed very well in the past few years, especially during the epidemic.
In this fast-growing industry, there are now more than thousands of suppliers, and the participants are not limited to small companies, but even enterprise services companies and consulting companies (Thomson Reuters, Oracle, IBM, etc.), military companies (FLIR, Thermoteknix, etc.), data brokers (Argyle, Gridwise, Stoovo, etc.), and other big technology companies (Google, Amazon) have participated.
Especially for large companies, the most typical should be Amazon: after the start of the epidemic, the "banana factory" has developed at least 8 office efficiency/monitoring/auxiliary software and incentive plans, mainly for non-civilian employees such as logistics center employees and delivery truck drivers.
Of course, in addition to these products, technologies and plans launched after the epidemic, before the epidemic, Amazon had also developed technologies to monitor work performance for civilian employees (including engineers) who worked remotely.
Products from Amazon counted in the database Image source: Coworker.org
The report points out that many overhaul software is contrary to the spirit of gdpr in terms of data privacy ethics. However, these software targets manual workers, gig economy participants and other people who are very vulnerable in the job market in the epidemic era, in order to have a job to support their families, they are largely forced to accept various supervision software that their employers force them to use.
The report also notes that the companies themselves are adept at avoiding legal risks, and that their investors are contributing and escorting: "Their investors, including VCs, PE and hedge funds, are pumping capital to an unregulated industry at record speeds." ”
As a result, these companies are currently largely under little regulatory pressure.
Nowadays, the main targets of legislative intervention in the form of excessive squeezing of employees and the invasion of personal privacy are large technology companies. Take, for example, the Algorithmic Accountability Act, passed in the United States in 2019, which is only for large companies with more than $50 million in annual revenue or more than 100 million people in data.
However, in terms of overgrown software, a very well-known data broker named Argyle has data on the purported more than 80% of the gig economy participants in the United States, providing a variety of data support for the squeezing of their contract workers by a well-known sharing economy company such as Uber – but the company's annual revenue is estimated to be less than $30 million, which is not within the scope of regulation.
But just a few days ago, the state of Washington, home to tech hub Seattle, passed the Silence No More Act, becoming the second state in the United States to pass a similar law after California. The law prohibits employers from restricting employees from publicly or privately discussing workplace injustices such as sexual harassment, discrimination, and retaliation through non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), and the bill was initiated by two female employees who were fired from Apple and Google.
The news seems to signal that in an era when the way of working has been radically rewritten by high technology, algorithms and the Internet, employee protection is increasingly being taken seriously – and this is certainly a good thing.