[D66] Your Boss Is Spying on You

[Antid Oto]

  Your Boss Is Spying on You

By
Ben Burgis
jacobinmag.com
4 min
View Original 
<https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fjacobinmag.com%2F2020%2F04%2Fworker-surveillance-work-from-home-employee-monitoring-software%3F__cf_chl_jschl_tk__%3Dd29ecd39c72886eb6e5dc5b64d3fe3d28022a510-1587026848-0-AUAnXsORiINylMQEVbBw3Co2FMJbJIuPVmHcPHIHdayFSiIrjKT7U_JEQo-Quh1XRElyH67ZJCQpf2iBaXHzH3EEU9QCnzSycYOgFLjOss6-A80wxGJoVvMcGz7KfeB8y_1cv6-QldUybP8T0IGJEzdOJ4Nx7vT9kPwVPxwLcK-eBLByja82I9NaQwQ2GVJd0msLL5DX2fEdxbHyA9QyX-gP-GvHh1f58Jg7OlZagNEW4lPMRUsy2Jwt8IkJ1Frdj55RpZtJfzygMD7Aw3ltznrbsu9h-vv7pZxRRj80itrEGfK1DsInC3xwlN_aElR-j2kiYcu4hk5XDvbj8MN56uBMYKNVGtAzQGpgHeAhQ3uhlqnptxGmkWL_A-PNjThdPONb2H7kzsoYWb-Ywt7IWHeoaUVIL-9GJZfn-H99r4rm>

With millions of people now working from their homes, frantic bosses are 
buying high-tech surveillance software to track their employees’ every 
keystroke. It’s the latest example of how capitalism is built on 
employer despotism.


Like almost all of the 1.5 million instructors at colleges and 
universities in the United States, I’ve been teaching online for weeks. 
I don’t much like it. I love leading classroom discussions and hate 
grading. Online teaching means none of the former and a whole lot of the 
latter.

Even so, it’s not so bad. Despite working in increasingly corporatized 
universities, where most instructors are adjuncts or work under 
contingent full-time contracts with no meaningful job security, people 
who teach for a living at the post-secondary level are among the most 
autonomous non-managerial employees in America. I have wide latitude to 
set my own schedule and decide many of the details about how I carry out 
my job on a day-to-day basis. If anything, that freedom is enhanced by 
staying at home.

The vast majority of US workers are a lot less lucky. As socialists have 
always pointed out, workplaces are sites of tyranny 
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/freedom-from-the-boss>. Since most 
people have trouble finding the starter capital to build a business of 
their own, and the majority 
<https://www.fundera.com/blog/what-percentage-of-small-businesses-fail> 
of small businesses quickly go under, the average person has no 
realistic choice but to go to work for someone else. As Karl Marx said, 
workers are “doubly free” — free to sell their labor to an employer, and 
free to starve if they decline to do so.

Libertarians and other defenders of the economic status quo like to 
portray capitalist employment as a completely voluntary market 
transaction between freely contracting agents, but most workers have 
very little bargaining power as individuals. It’s a lot easier for most 
bosses to replace one worker than it is for most workers to replace 
their source of livelihood.

This power imbalance is reflected in everything from the tens of 
millions of workers who are compelled to sign 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/opinion/american-workers-noncompete-agreements.html> 
noncompete clauses that stop them from switching jobs without learning 
entirely different skills to the autocratic tactics of companies like 
Amazon 
<https://jacobinmag.com/2020/02/jeff-bezos-aoc-ocasio-cortez-amazon-earth-fund-cooperative>, 
which uses high-tech surveillance to make sure packages are processed at 
a breakneck speed — and that workers don’t linger so much as a minute 
too long in the bathroom.

The coronavirus has forced workers who can only do their jobs at 
specific physical locations to accept a grim choice: risk losing their 
employment (and usually their health insurance), or risk their lives by 
going to work.

But what about the comparatively lucky ones who can work from home with 
no loss of income? That sounds like it should be a recipe for increased 
freedom — perhaps even one where workers and employers freely contract 
with one another like a couple of premodern farmers haggling about how 
many eggs to trade for a quart of fresh milk. The employer provides an 
income; the employee, in turn, completes her tasks in whatever way she 
pleases.

But this is the real world, not the fever dreams of libertarians. 
Employers, intent on maintaining their workplace authority, are turning 
to Orwellian technological means to block employees from gaining even an 
iota of autonomy. Software makers such as InterGuard, Time Doctor, 
Teramind, VeriClock, innerActiv, ActivTrak, and Hubstaff have seen 
increased demand 
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-27/bosses-panic-buy-spy-software-to-keep-tabs-on-remote-workers> 
since the beginning of the pandemic. Each provides minute-by-minute, 
keystroke-by-keystroke monitoring as workers complete tasks in what 
should be the privacy of their own homes. Each also provide 
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-27/bosses-panic-buy-spy-software-to-keep-tabs-on-remote-workers>s 
bosses with “productivity metrics,” including how often a worker is 
sending emails.

For some companies, even on-camera Zoom meetings haven’t been enough 
surveillance. They took advantage of the software’s “attention tracking” 
feature, which allowed bosses to see when a participant had navigated 
away from the meeting for more than thirty seconds. After widespread 
outcry about the feature — which could be turned on without workers’ 
knowledge — Zoom discontinued 
<https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-users/> it 
earlier this month.

Still, businesses have plenty of autocratic tricks up their sleeves. And 
the effect of all these measures is to make employees feel, if anything, 
/more/ closely monitored than they would in a physical workplace. 
“Jane,” an anonymous source quoted by Vox 
<https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/2/21195584/coronavirus-remote-work-from-home-employee-monitoring>’s 
Recode and an employee of a company that spies on her with the ominously 
named TeamViewer software, reports that she can barely “stand up and 
stretch” without worrying that TeamViewer will log her out for being 
idle or that her boss will send a “check-in email.”

Alison Green of the website Ask a Manager <https://www.askamanager.org/> 
says she’s heard from multiple people that their employers have asked 
them to stay logged in to a video conference call the entire workday day 
so that they’re constantly on camera. Axos Financial sent 
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-27/bosses-panic-buy-spy-software-to-keep-tabs-on-remote-workers> 
an email to its employees warning that not only were their keystrokes 
being logged but a random screenshot would be captured every ten minutes 
to ensure they’re on task.

The CEO of Axos, Gregory Garrabrants, is one of the highest-paid bank 
CEOs in America 
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-11/ceo-of-tiny-california-bank-makes-twice-as-much-as-jamie-dimon>. 
Asked whether Garrabrants would be subject to the same kind of 
surveillance as /he/ worked from home, Axos spokesman Gregory Frost 
declined to comment 
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-27/bosses-panic-buy-spy-software-to-keep-tabs-on-remote-workers>. 
Anyone with half a brain knows the answer. Rules like that aren’t for 
people like Garrabrants. They’re for the “doubly free” workers under the 
boss’s all-seeing eye.

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