The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score

Across industries and incomes, more employees are being tracked,
recorded and ranked. What is gained, companies say, is efficiency and accountability. What is lost?

By Jodi Kantor and Arya Sundaram

A few years ago, Carol Kraemer, a longtime finance executive, took a
new job. Her title, senior vice president, was impressive. The
compensation was excellent: $200 an hour.

But her first paychecks seemed low. ...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/14/business/worker-productivity-tracking.html


************************* Moderator's Note *************************

Anyone whom has been employed to tune a Spamassassin filter or block
access to certain websites or re-re-re-install windblows after the 3rd
or 4th time an employee has clicked "Yes" once-too-often will under-
stand when I point out that the great majority of office employees are
proof that the average corporate computer user is both brain-dead and
oblivious to the dangers which computers pose to their privacy and to
their income.

Multivariant analysis of keypress frequency, word counts, repetitive
patterns, email addresses sent-to or received-from, and time-away- from-keyboard factors can be used to accurately predict and measure
the start, length, and periodicity of a female employee's lunar
cycle.

Or, the lack of same.

Now, that kind of information is both dangerous and useful. It's
dangerous because it can confirm preconceived notions about female
employee's productivity, social tendencies, or work-ethic. It
is also useful to a cutthroat capitalist, because it can be used to
detect pregnancies which an employee might not choose to reveal to her
boss, and therefore might make the boss feel justified in finding ways
to fire her before her new child disrupts the office workflow, leads
to demands for on-site child care, or raises the company's
health-insurance rates.

Some companies set up all corporate PC's to use a "secure" proxy
server which gives employees the impression that they are safe from
prying eyes and corporate monitoring, while in fact their employers
have access to every URL they type, every opinion they register, every
purchase they make, and every political ad they respond to, no matter
if the data was gathered during their lunch hour, or after their
workday had ended, or while working from home and forgetting to turn
off the corporate VPN.

Most companies don't bother: they just buy the data from pageface or
metube or Pamazonian. The result is the same: pregnant females can be
quietly offered a "promotion" which is actually a transfer to the
mommy-track not-our-class-dear ghetto where they will languish until
they quit.

We did it to ourselves. We obliviously became early adapters of AOL
Instant Messenger, we employed brain-dead self-serving lies to justify
a "weather app" that reports our click lists to vicious opportunists
whom sell it to anyone with money to spend, and we chose not to ask
why the fresh-new-girl who was actually competent at making
spreadsheets useful had suddenly been transferred to a small
department that will end her career and her chance of having any of
the dremas she'll give up as her options are removed one-by-one.

We did it to ourselves.

Bill Horne

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