This makes government surveillance (as serious as it is) feel like a distant, abstract issue.
The sentence you quoted is framed to make some of those things sound worse than they are. "Listen to phone calls" - does that just refer to call centers recording calls for training/quality purposes? And "Monitor closed-circuit television" just is another way of saying "Many low-income employees work in places with security cameras." Finally, "require psychometric tests" sounds ominous, but a) college serves as a long psychometric test and b) interviews are informal psychometric tests.
The unifying thread is that employers have to invest more in supervising low-productivity workers.
A lot of that creepy stuff is moving upwards to white collar jobs, does that weaken the argument the article makes or does it just mean the problem is expanding 'upwards'?
why do you believe these workers are low-productivity? are they unworthy of dignity and privacy as a result?
why do you believe the employers are qualified supervisors? have you never had a bad manager? might it be possible that the employers have no idea how to encourage productivity, and that low productivity is induced by a coercive and surveilled work environment?
so many assumptions packed into those little words...
In Wall Street these were mandatory since many years ago.
Source: was tested for drugs as a part of my employment screening.
Having your work phone calls monitored is hardly something to get worked up about (you're using your phone for work...do you also get mad when your supervisors monitor your work in person?) and almost certainly not specific to low income employees.
CCTV is literally everywhere, nobody low income works in my building and everyone's monitored with CCTV. Big whoop.
Psychometric tests are very, very uncommon and not at all specific to low income employees, in fact, I'd argue the opposite (I mean... college is basically treated as a psychometric test)
Interesting. My experience has been the opposite. Haven't been drug tested since I got my last minimum wage job working in a grocery store.
> Having your work phone calls monitored is hardly something to get worked up about (you're using your phone for work...do you also get mad when your supervisors monitor your work in person?)
Uh.. yeah, if my boss starts watching me work directly and isn't actively collaborating with me - I'm going to be looking for a new job..
> Nobody low income works in my building and everyone's monitored with CCTV.
Very curious where you are located? That's certainly not the norm in any dev shop I've worked in. There's cameras on the server rooms - and building security.. but nobody is monitoring the employees. Are you US based?
> Psychometric tests are very uncommon and not at all specific to low income employees, I'd argue the opposite (I mean... college is basically treated as a psychometric test)
College is not a psychometric test. A psychometric test is one of those "You see your coworker report to work drunk out of his mind, do you: A. Contact management, B. Pull out a 5th to help him with the Hair of the Dog, or C. Not notice because you're too high to give a fuck."
I've filled out several of those over the years - ALL for low-wage retail positions. If you want to argue high-earners are tested - the long-form interview process is closer to the equivalent.
Typical 21st century office building, really.
Cameras for asset protection and building security != your boss looking over your shoulder while you work.
Source: a few acquaintances who worked as organizers by strategically taking jobs in certain companies.
You may have been out of the low income market for too long. The landscape has changed. The vast majority of minimum-wage jobs come with drug testing requirements in my area. In the meantime, over my entire professional software development career, I have only been asked to take a drug test twice (and declined once -- the job was nowhere near good enough to put up with that kind of nonsense).
I'd offer a different take: they are required often for skilled manufacturing jobs, like for people operating precision or dangerous machinery.
I've seen many anecdotes where factory owners say that they can't find workers for machine operator positions who don't test positive for meth or opioids.
It's also possible that some of those employers are using drug tests as a sort of "morality" bar, but I'd bet they primarily want to protect their expensive capital equipment and their other non drug using employees from potential drug-use related accidents.
But I doubt there is a lot of drug testing for burger flipping or grocery bagging type jobs, especially not in a tight labor market as exists today.
no one's drug testing people making 100k+, but drug tests for low-level jobs are far, far more common than you think.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/employment-tren...
>There is no definitive data on how many companies conduct drug tests, though the Society for Human Resources Management found in a survey that 57 percent do so. Nor is there any recent data on how many have dropped marijuana from mandatory drug testing.
>After the Drug-Free Workplace Act was enacted in 1988, amid concerns about cocaine use, drug testing spread to most large companies. All Fortune 500 companies now engage in some form of drug testing, according to Barry Sample, a senior director at Quest Diagnostics, one of the largest testing firms.
For example, Walmart is number one on the list. Is it the CEO who is being tested, or the guys unloading the shipping trucks?
Not that I ever did drugs because there was no way I was going to risk the government coming down on me, but it's an example of how drug testing is still something mostly relegated to the lower paying jobs unless your employer has reasonable suspicion in the case of government work.
If the company is accepting US government contracts, and you would be working on a team under such a contract, then the company is likely to be required to drug test you even if a security clearance is not required.
That's not what VC's obsession about scale is all about. Volume matters. Millions of poor parents buying diapers can make an empire.
That entirely depends on how you define "rich" and "poor", which is a nontrivial thing to decide. In 2019 in the US, the top 10% wealthiest households collectively have more than twice as much money as the bottom 90% collectively. But lots of people in the top 10% don't consider themselves "rich".
Depending on the part of the nation you're talking about. In much of the nation, exceeding 100k makes you unambiguously wealthy. In other areas, you'd have a hard time living anything more than a squarely middle class lifestyle on that.
It's not about "playing games", it's that economic conditions vary so wildly across the nation that you can't accurately characterize what's "rich" and "poor" using the same scale everywhere.
That's why I say that determining "rich" and "poor" is a difficult thing to do.
I'm also not convinced that privacy problems truly affect the poor more. The government surveillance mentioned here is a big problem. But on the commercial side, companies are a lot more interested in acquiring the personal, financial, and medical data of the rich. And as the article admits, people making higher incomes are more likely to have their information stolen.
A lot of the evidence in this piece amounts to "surveys show that people earning under $40k worry about X more than people earning over $40k." That's a very weak form of evidence.