Everything is randomly recorded and workers are micromanaged down to the minute. You came in a minute late. You came in a minute early. You didn't take lunch when we told you to. Your calls run too long. Your calls are too short.
That on top of the UBA tools being deployed against workers to track how much time they spend working vs tweeting, WPM typed, etc.
This has been going on for a very long time under the name of "adherence" or equivalent. Walmart getting in on this game isn't exactly new.
Good short story on surveillance & algorithms micromanaging low wage workers.
If you have read any sci-fi from the early/mid 20th century, you already know the answer to that.
Well, that's the thing. No one would accept a shitty deal unless they had to. All other means of survival have been privatized hundreds of years ago.
I remember refusing a stinky project. It was pointless. I didn’t get fired or anything—-manager just assigned it to the guy in the next cubicle over.
Langdon Winner is another person who writes on this topic at a more abstract societal level, like in his "Autonomous technology: technics-out-of-control as a theme in political thought". https://www.langdonwinner.com/
And see also "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt: http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ "Who are you going to be? That is the question. In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy. Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."
But there are no end of others. But living up to your ideals is often easier said then done in so many areas of life... It helps to have a group of people with common ideals to support each other.
But for example, when I was in CivilEngineering&OR graduate school in Princeton in the late 1980s, I was essentially told by the then director of graduate studies that taking a public policy course from Frank von Hippel ( https://www.princeton.edu/sgs/faculty-staff/frank-von-hippel... ) that included topics like ethics and engineering policy especially about energy policy and weapons proliferation would hurt my career there and was strongly discouraged from taking it. I took it anyway. :-) But that was all no doubt part of why I ended up leaving after a year. The majority of other engineering students even then were from other countries and funded by their governments or companies and had less choice in how compliant they had to be.
That was perhaps a reason Princeton lost a chance at maybe being the first to develop the web (although I made many mistakes myself along the way too): https://pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html "This was my proposal for graduate studies at Princeton University twenty [now thirty] years ago (and in some ways includes a proposal for creating a mini-Google and a mini-World-Wide-Web. :-)."
If you call a corporation and chat with them, the conversation is recorded and used for quality purposes. This is normal.
If you grab some groceries and ask to return one of the items you thought was on sale but wasn't, and this fact is noted by an audio recording system, suddenly this isn't normal.
I don't have feelings about this either way, but it's interesting to contrast the situations.
This device is also not intended for that use case. It's meant to generate metrics to "ensure employees are actually greeting." If you are SO FLUSH WITH CASH and in such a dearth of things to do with it that you are quite literally trying to optimize your greeter metrics, there is a bloody problem.
Then there is the case that the very idea borders on abusive micromanagement. The kind that can only be plausibly skated under the radar through copious use of passive voice when describing it.
Life worked JUST FINE not being recorded audio/video or otherwise.
If profit hounding is reaching such high levels, a Wal-Mart greeter can't be trusted to make a decision whether or not a customer is in the mood for a greeting, then it is quite obvious that someone further up the chain has completely lost touch with the idea of "Professional Courtesy".
Never mind that half of this metrics gathering wouldn't be necessary if the company weren't trying to out grow the problem it's trying to solve by hemorrhaging labor in favor of machines.
The modern community is rife with distrust. More and more, people drift farther and farther away from each other. Mental and physical illness become more and more serious problems as humans are increasingly expected to behave as mass-produced cogs, interchangeable, and undeviating in how they carry out their job. The human psyche doesn't cope well with that. Humans are DYNAMIC. They are creative creatures, with difference being built into every decision.
The kind of control that industry keeps pushing for illustrates that leadership has little, or deprioritizes any semblance of human respect and dignity in how they engage with labor in favor of a more attractive bottom line to attract investers.
It isn't innovation. It isn't improvement. It certainly isn't engaging with and being a fundamental positive force within a community.
It's about plopping a pump down into a puddle of untapped value and sucking it dry, to hell with the consequences for society, the community, or those we leave behind to emulate the values we clearly espoused by letting it happen unchallenged.
I don't know about anyone else, but this is disgusting behavior of a sort that deserves more than mild degree of censure.
Let's play this out - imagine they implement this. They spend millions (realistically tens/hundreds of millions) putting up sensor systems, spinning up data center capacity, hiring analysts and all the auxiliary work that goes along with this sort of program, all for what - to further dehumanize some poor middle age single mother who's making $9 an hour? And for what -to optimize some stupid metric?
Walmart would be far better off putting that money into the wages of their lowest paid employees, or investing that money into manager training and giving people on the ground help.
In my mind this is where inequality really starts to bite - this level of surveillance at work is disproportionately aimed towards those with the least power and agency.
People naturally want a stable peaceful life and will suck it up.
But one day this bluff will be called.
What kills me is we hear about this w/ regards to lower waged workers. I make many times more than a Walmart worker and I don't have near the pressure on me to perform. I put it on myself, because I know I'm privileged to be doing something I enjoy, but I don't have to put up with anything near what they do. I think it's just another example of the haves hating on the have nots. They don't trust them to do their jobs well so they have to poke and pry at them. It's disgusting.
If you're talking to a checker (or anyone) face-to-face, there's an absence of any explicit industrial medium. You're going to have the sense that whatever industrialized processes are in place, the face-to-face conversation is out-of-band. Of course it's going to be a surprise when it's not, short of explicitly notifying people otherwise.
I don't find it "interesting" in the slightest.
People, even at work, should have some privacy rights.
I don't think a Worker's Privacy Bill will get passed in the near future. The corporations have won for now. It's too bad.
We are so conditioned to being abused by corporations they have us arguing over where the line is.
These corporations know hiring will never be a problem for most positions, so why not get cute?
In any organization, when you don't have any team spirit; your employees/widgets will find ways to screw you over.
I find Amazon's hand monitor patent appalling.
(I'm dropping you again Amazon--thanks for another reason. I was going to drop them because they changed the way to drop the monthly Prime plan, but this news was the last straw.)
Without the amplifying power of network effects to offset Industy's increased cash reserves to simply wait out the miniscule by comparison reserves of a legal Union, there really is no serious incentive to get Industry actors to really pay attention. Thus is the danger of legislation without sunset dates.
Can't comment on ACLU. Haven't kept up with them nowadays.
This is classic Industrialist overreach. Taft-Hartley be damned. Enough is enough. Corporate America needs a wake-up call, and I think the unions may need to brush off the dust and get back in the game.
It's one thing to play with hypotheticals, but Corporations are starting to leverage capital advantaged positions in order to dictate what values the average American can expect in their lifetime.
It's a slow, insidious process that will happen over several generations, and if a stand isn't made against this sort of thing, it qualifies as implicit acceptance of the status quo.
If industry is going to try to build itself into a position where it can micromanage every iota of the working day out of a perceived superior position brought by cornering the "market" on economic power "capital", then labor needs to be willing to say "have fun with that, we'll find another way to survive."
I get this may come across as hyperbolic rhetoric, but it is absolutely INSANE that people are thinking about IMPLEMENTING these sorts of things.