Oh, first they’ll talk about productivity, then they’ll talk about liabiilty, then the next thing you know …
You’ve got them, under your skin …
There are rules enforced today that have tons of effect on actual practices in the workplace. If you don’t believe that the law has an effect on how corporations treat employees, then that’s your own personal blindness. By and large, corporations follow the laws that govern the workforce. When they break the law in any significant or systematic way, it’s news. When it stops being news, that’s when to worry.
This is what’s called the real world. Your boss has the right to order your ass around, and tell you what to do, the goverment doesn’t. Your boss has the right to know where you are when you’re on the clock, the government doesn’t.
And the reason your boss has the right to order your ass around is because you have a contract with him…you do X, according to his wishes, and he pays you Y amount of money for doing it. And, most importantly, either one of you can break the contract if it does not work to your satisfaction. None of this is true about the government.
I am not necessarily in favor of anyone planting chips in people, but I certainly think that government and buisness are in no way analagous in this regard.
Something very similar has been done for years in the transport industry. Most companies with a fleet of trucks on the road have transponders on all their trucks. They know exactly where they are and how far they have travelled every minute. They driver himself can park the machine and slip away to Betty’s Breast Bar, but if he takes the truck to Betty’s, the office will know. The same is true of many courier trucks and service tech trucks.
Most cell phones have the capacity for tracking, but if you want to see where your kid went when he said he was at the library, it’ll cost you extra.
What about those of us who don’t work ‘on the clock’? I’m a salaried employee and my employer could really care less how many hours I spend working on something or when I spend those hours, as long as I make my deadlines. I would object to being chipped because quite frankly, it’s none of my employer’s business where I am 24/7, it’s their business if I get my assigned work done by the assigned deadline.
Since I am paid the exact same amount whether that work takes me 10 minutes or 10 hours, why should it matter to them if I went to the coffee shop across the street as long as I made the deadline?
Maybe it shouldn’t matter, but to some employers, it does. My previous employer was one of those that had everyone…and I mean everyone…punching a timeclock, no matter what their job title or compensation. In in the morning, out for lunch, back in after lunch, and out at the end of the day. It was annoying, sure, but I can’t say it is unreasonable for them to want to know that you are in the office.
Being chipped is a different thing, of course, because you are right…they don’t need to know where you are on your “own time,” but having some way of keeping track of what employees are up to during the time they are supposed to be working seems to be to be within the realm of what is reasonable for a company to do.
I think it’s funny that so many people who can’t handle the “nanny state” concept are perfectly OK with literally invasive corporate monitoring programs.
I’m sorry, but when I hire on to do a job, I hire on to do the job, I don’t hire on to become a robot slave. If my job involves stacking widgets or cleaning floors or writing reports, that’s what I do. Gets boring otherwise. I don’t hire on to have my boss know when I went to the can and how long I took each time. Maybe you’re OK with that, but I’d call being OK with that unduly … servile.
So would I…that’s one of the reasons I am no longer at the place where I have to punch the clock. I don’t think it is ethical for companies to implant chips in people. Having other ways to track employees while they are working, however, is up to the company. I wouldn’t run a company that way, but I don’t see a jusification for making it illegal.
Who is ok with it? I’ve said at least 2 or 3 time that I don’t agree with implanting chips in people. I think it’s unethical and an unreasonable abuse of corporate power.
I don’t really have much of a ‘time that [I am] supposed to be working’. Other than scheduled meetings, I can work any hours of the day that I feel like working. If I’d rather work at 3 am than 3 pm, that’s fine. If I want to work 24 straight and then take off an entire day, it doesn’t matter at all. I can attend meetings from almost anywhere - if there’s WiFi and I can use a cell phone, I can have a meeting there.
Airports, coffee shops, Panera Bread, outside in downtown Pittsburgh, in my apartment, even in my car, I can perform almost every function of my job that I need to do, with the exception of organized course training with a physically present instructor, or the even more rare face-to-face with a client.
As a practical matter, the way that my employer ‘keeps track’ of what I’m up to, that’s what milestones and alignment calls and weekly status meetings are for. It’s why my code is kept in an online repository, checked out when I’m actively working and checked in when I’m not, it’s why a package is built weekly as a partial deliverable for QA and customer testing, and it’s why there are checkpoint reviews with the QA team looking at my work at defined points in the process which correspond to various deadlines. They know what I’m up to because it’s built into the engineering process. Having an electronic leash up my ass so they know where I do the things I do that blow the boss away won’t help. It’ll decrease morale, and I’ll be less willing to pour my heart and soul into this job. I do that now because of the vast level of freedom that comes with doing a good job here.
For all they know, I write my best code on the shitter. They don’t ask. They honestly don’t care, because my deliverables are good and my deadlines are met. I can take a break whenever I want to post here, play pool or cards, head for the coffee shop, or just go outside and enjoy the snow. Amazingly this company has figured out that if you treat your employees well, they will treat the company well.
You have a sweet deal! Sounds like a great company to work for, but they are getting a good deal, too, because you are obviously motivated & reliable. I don’t disagree at all that companies are probably better off with an attitude as you describe, rather than keeping track of people as if they were kindergarten kids.
But we are talking about three different things:
- What a smart way to run a business is
- What is ethical
- What is or should be illegal.
I would say that having some way to keep track of employees that does NOT involve implanting chips into them may or may not be a smart way to run a business. I don’t know, it probably depends partially on the type of business it is. Having the GPS in delivery trucks and such makes a lot of sense to me, for instance. I believe this kind of tracking is ethical, as long as the employee is made aware of it, and I see no reason for it to be illegal.
On the other hand, a company MAY think that implanting devices in people a good business practice, but IMO, it is REALLY skirting the ethical line because of the invasiveness and the potential for it to track movements when a person is on their own personal time. Whether or not it should be illegal, I’m not sure, but I would probably lean towards yes. Although generally I am for a laissez-faire attitude for the government to take towards business/employee relationships, I think in this case, it is really an abuse of corporate power over individuals. What a company can ask you to do on work time is one thing, trying to nose into a person’s personal life is another.
I wish to hell more comapnies would discover this astonishing phenomenon. In the past, I’ve worked for companies who were perplexed by their massive turn-over and responded by treating the employees they had like shit since they “weren’t going to stick around anyway.” It never occured to them to wonder if their behavior was contributing to the cycle. No, it must be that all of the workers were garbage and should be reminded of that as frequently as possible through the way they were treated.
The job I have now pays so little that the checks are mostly a symbolic gesture, but they treat their employees so well that we all bust our asses to do as much as we can, even coming in on our off hours to volunteer to help our co-workers with special projects.