[acb-hsp] Work As Prison

[peter altschul]

Work is Becoming More Like Prison As Some Workers Forced to Wear 
Electronic Bands That Track Everything They Do (Including 
Bathroom Breaks)
  Tana Ganeva February 15, 2013
  The human body, with its need for rest, nutrition and 
hydration, is such an inefficient tool for capitalist production.  
But while machines are unlikely to replace human workers anytime 
soon, new technologies can deftly strip workers of their 
humanity!
  The Irish Independent reports that grocery giant TESCO has 
strapped electronic armbands to their warehouse workers to 
measure their productivity, tracking their actions so closely 
that management knows when they briefly pause to drink from a 
water fountain or take a bathroom break.  These unforgivable 
lapses in productivity impact workers' performance score, which 
management then apparently uses to terrify them into working 
faster.
  "The devices give a set amount of time for a task, such as 20 
minutes to load packets of soft drinks.  If they did it in 20 
minutes, they would get 100pc, but would get 200pc if they were 
twice as fast," writes the Independent.  Although TESCO denied 
that bathroom breaks impact productivity scores, one former 
staffer the Independent spoke with said he got a "surprisingly 
lower" score when he took a bathroom break.
  "Sometimes, management would call staff to an office and tell 
them they had to do better if their scores were low."
  "I had really easy assignments and when I'd come back after a 
break, I would get a horrendous score and wonder why," he said.
  He added that since the introduction of the device workers 
faced increasing pressure to produce more and more.
  But working people close to death has some downsides for 
companies.  Studies show that work stress is linked to physical 
and mental ailments, from sleep deprivation to chronic disease.  
In the end, stressed, sick workers saddle companies both with 
rising health costs (for those that actually pay for employee 
health expenses) and the costs of high turnover.  According to 
the COULDC, excessive workloads and changing demands are the 
biggest triggers of work stress.
  Using machines to extract as much labor as humanely possible 
from workers has a long history.  (Even the clock has ignobly 
served as a tool of managerial abuse -- in some industrial towns 
factory owners were known to change the town clock to cheat 
workers out of time off.)
  As surveillance technology advances, companies can increasingly 
track all aspects of their workers' time and activity.  Frederick 
Taylor -- who pioneered the idea of parsing worker time down to 
seconds -- and Henry Ford would be jealous.
  In the 1980's, computer technology opened up previously 
undreamed of ways of monitoring workers.  Keystroke programs 
could track the typing speed of receptionists and other clerical 
workers throughout the day.  These days many places of employment 
-- particularly low-wage workplaces -- have found even more 
sophisticated ways to panic employees by tracking their every 
move for lapses in productivity.
  In SuperVision: An Introduction to the Surveillance Society, 
John Gilliom and Torin Monahan talk about encountering a frantic 
hotel maid who told them she had to alert management every time 
she cleaned a room, so they could track how many she finished and 
how fast.  A new phone app can be used to constantly measure 
speed and location.  "If workers stand still or sit down for even 
a few seconds, management knows," write Gilliom and Monahan.
  Call centers also nightmarishly try to control every second of 
employees' time.  At the Time Warner Cable call center, Gilliom 
writes, employees have only 8 seconds to get their paperwork done 
between calls.  Calls are also recorded to later gauge employee 
helpfulness and friendliness when dealing with customers.
  Alterationet has previously reported on biometric time clocks 
and fingerprint readers, which use iris scans, face recognition 
technology and digital fingerprints to more closely track when 
employees come in and out of work and the duration of their 
breaks.  Unlike punch cards or key codes -- which allow employees 
to cover for each, by letting them punch in tardy co-workers -- 
using unique physical attributes like eyes or fingerprints 
ensures workers cannot shave a minute or two from their workday 
without management knowing and keeping a record.  Service workers 
also often toil under the watchful eye of surveillance cameras 
that managers can either view in real time or record.
  But increased surveillance not only creates a more stressful 
workplace for workers, it also effects the product, Gilliom 
points out.  For example, nurses are no longer taking the time to 
get to know their patients because hospitals make more money when 
more people are hustled through.  In the past, nurses had ways to 
circumvent hospital pressure.  Now, electronic tracking of 
patient movement means that medical professionals will spend far 
less time with you when you are sick.