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<h1 class="css-1z36ek">Your Boss Is Spying on You</h1>
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<div class="css-7kp13n">By</div>
<div class="css-7ol5x1"><span class="css-acjdas">Ben Burgis</span></div>
<div class="css-8rl9b7">jacobinmag.com</div>
<div class="css-zskk6u">4 min</div>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The vast majority of US workers are a lot
less lucky. As socialists have always
pointed out, <a
href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/freedom-from-the-boss">workplaces
are sites of tyranny</a>. Since most
people have trouble finding the starter
capital to build a business of their own,
and the <a
href="https://www.fundera.com/blog/what-percentage-of-small-businesses-fail">majority</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>This power imbalance is reflected in
everything from the tens of millions of
workers who are <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/opinion/american-workers-noncompete-agreements.html">compelled
to sign</a> noncompete clauses that stop
them from switching jobs without learning
entirely different skills to the autocratic
tactics of companies like <a
href="https://jacobinmag.com/2020/02/jeff-bezos-aoc-ocasio-cortez-amazon-earth-fund-cooperative">Amazon</a>,
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-27/bosses-panic-buy-spy-software-to-keep-tabs-on-remote-workers">increased
demand</a> 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 <a
href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-27/bosses-panic-buy-spy-software-to-keep-tabs-on-remote-workers">provide</a>s
bosses with “productivity metrics,”
including how often a worker is sending
emails.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-users/">discontinued</a>
it earlier this month.</p>
<p>Still, businesses have plenty of autocratic
tricks up their sleeves. And the effect of
all these measures is to make employees
feel, if anything, <em>more</em> closely
monitored than they would in a physical
workplace. “Jane,” an anonymous source
quoted by <a
href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/2/21195584/coronavirus-remote-work-from-home-employee-monitoring">Vox</a>’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.”</p>
<p>Alison Green of the website <a
href="https://www.askamanager.org/">Ask a
Manager</a> 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 <a
href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-27/bosses-panic-buy-spy-software-to-keep-tabs-on-remote-workers">sent</a>
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.</p>
<p>The CEO of Axos, Gregory Garrabrants, is
one of the <a
href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-11/ceo-of-tiny-california-bank-makes-twice-as-much-as-jamie-dimon">highest-paid
bank CEOs in America</a>. Asked whether
Garrabrants would be subject to the same
kind of surveillance as <em>he</em> worked
from home, Axos spokesman Gregory Frost <a
href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-27/bosses-panic-buy-spy-software-to-keep-tabs-on-remote-workers">declined
to comment</a>. 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.</p>
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