BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING - BIG TIME!

Relentless monitoring of workers on the job is becoming normative. It is an intolerable assault on human dignity.

We have many reasons to be on edge. Extremist violence is exploding throughout society like incessant firecrackers. One strains to find a unifying ideology behind the violence. “Nihilism” seems an apt descriptor. Our fate may be determined by power-hungry and craven Republicans who egg them on and are ready to sell their country down the river for the sake of their self-aggrandizement and inflated egos. We experience a society that is viciously divided and plagued with nastiness. We confront flourishing irrationality and fealty to a political cult leader who commands the obeisance of tens of millions. And two hundred years of the American democratic experiment may soon come to an end.

There is much more. But an article on the front page of the August 15th New York Times made my skin crawl. Whatever one thinks of The New York Times, I think it is to be commended in an age of sound bites for producing longer stories that bespeak serious investigative journalism. Articles beginning on the first page continue for several more a few pages back. So it is with this piece.

The headline reads, “On the Clock and Tracked by the Minute: More Employees Labor Under Digital Eye.” I found the article blood-curdling because its content assaults my most deeply cherished values.

The gist of the article is that it has become normative for employers to impose surveillance on every minute the workers are on the job. The surveillance is inescapable. People in the workplace are continually watched and monitored to ensure that their overlords can squeeze them for maximum productivity. The pandemic and off-site work generated greater surveillance, and this remains as people return to the office.

Why this offends – I submit it is egregiously horrific – I will get to below. But it is important to quote the article at length to provide a flavor of what this relentless scrutiny entails:

“Since the dawn of modern offices, workers have orchestrated their actions by watching the clock. Now, more and more, the clock is watching them. In lower-paying jobs, the monitoring is already ubiquitous: not just at Amazon where the second-by-second measurements became notorious, but also for Kroger cashiers, UPS drives and millions of others. Eight of the 10 largest private U.S. employers track the productivity metrics of individual workers, many in real time, according to an examination by The New York Times.”

Even if eight out of 10 of the largest private employers is an overstatement, the ubiquity of this phenomenon is extraordinary and horrifically details the reality of the workplace in contemporary America. But there is much more:

“Now digital productivity monitoring is also spreading among white-collar jobs and roles that require graduate degrees. Many employees, whether working remotely or in person, are subject to trackers, scores, “idle” buttons, or just quiet, constantly accumulating records. Pauses can lead to penalties, from lost pay to lost jobs.”

“Architects, academic administrators, doctors, nursing home workers and lawyers described growing electronic surveillance over every minute of their workday. They echoed complaints that employees in many lower-paid positions have voiced for years: that their jobs are relentless, that they don’t have control — and in some cases, that they don’t even have enough time to use the bathroom. In interviews and in hundreds of written submissions to The Times, white-collar workers described being tracked as “demoralizing,” “humiliating” and “toxic.”

As a leader in the Ethical Culture Movement who has cherished the governing importance of humanistic values, and has held the hands of people on their death beds, the following struck me as the most intolerable of scenarios:

“The metrics are even applied to spiritual care for the dying. The Rev. Margo Richardson of Minneapolis became a hospice chaplain to help patients wrestle with deep, searching questions. 'This is the big test for everyone: How am I going to face my own death?' she said.

But two years ago, her employer started requiring chaplains to accrue more of what it called “productivity points.” A visit to the dying: as little as one point. Participating in a funeral: one and three-quarters points. A phone call to grieving relatives: one-quarter point.”

This is corporate capitalism at its most dehumanizing. Friends, if I lay dying in a hospice and were approached by a counselor who came to offer support, and I discovered that I was transformed into a vehicle for her accumulating “points,” I would bid her to leave my bedside and prefer to die alone. The entire concept is not only a glaring contradiction and egregiously corrupt. It is also obscenely inhuman, and I am impelled to explain why.

At the center of this oppression lies foundational ethical values. Immanuel Kant bids us to treat the humanity in others and ourselves as an end and not merely as a means. Perpetual surveillance eradicates our humanity by transforming the worker into a thing, an instrumentality, a tool that serves no other purpose than to turn out profits for the owners. It is wrong for the same reason that slavery is wrong. It converts the contemporary American worker into little more than a “wage slave.”

In Kant's moral framework, which is also mine, humanity is commensurate with autonomy, that is, self-governing freedom. Ethically speaking, humanity, freedom, autonomy, power, and dignity are correlative concepts. Rob a person of her autonomy, you have demeaned her dignity and diminished her humanity. It is the ultimate moral violation.

I turn to my academic field, human rights. At the center of the human rights program is the commitment to the protection and preservation of human dignity. The Universal Declaration, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, tersely enumerates in 30 articles the rights possessed by all people by virtue of their humanity. Article 24 states the following: “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.” The articles specified in the human rights documents, of which there is a proliferating number, are understood as an organic whole, and no right is construed as more important than any other. Some have noted that in comparison with other rights, for example, the right to be free of torture, the right to a vacation seems relatively trivial.

But this dismissal is misplaced. All rights emerge out of historical struggles that speak to deprivations and oppression. Some gave their lives in the labor struggles of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for the right to time off from work and to live one's life away from the drudgery spent laboring in factories.

Arguably, Article 24 finds its origins in the institution of the Hebrew Sabbath. It is a day set aside for rest when the Lord of the Universe commands that one may not work. There is something morally brilliant in the idea of the Sabbath in that it recognizes that one's humanity extends more broadly than serving exclusively as an instrument to turn out profit for the master, for the owner to whom workers yield their freedom for the sake of their survival.

The reality of omnipresent surveillance turns the human being as worker into little more than an extension of his or her work, as a cog in the machine of production. It is dehumanization that penetrates all the way down.

The early Karl Marx, in his “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, elucidates the oppression of the worker under capitalism. The centerpiece of his critique is alienation, and Marx contends that alienation herein is four-fold: The worker is alienated from what he produces and the processes of his labor over which he has no control. He is alienated from others, and he is ultimately alienated from himself and his nature. I contend that denial of any freedom to workers through such constant monitoring makes this alienation complete. It is the ultimate assault on one's humanity. It is the ultimate humiliation.

I cannot reflect on this phenomenon without my thoughts taking me back to the social critics of the 1950s who warned of the loss of individualism under corporate capitalism. Among them was David Reisman who wrote compellingly about conformity and lives directed by others. Erich Fromm analyzed the “authoritarian personality” who seeks an “escape from freedom.” In his book by that title, Fromm comments on the all-consuming power of the capitalist system in a way that creates the foundation for the total monitoring of the worker's activity on the job. One cannot think of Fromm's observation that “man becomes a cog in a vast economic machine” without referencing the current workplace situation as its ultimate fulfillment. He wrote:

“In capitalism economic activity, success, material gains, become ends in themselves. It becomes man’s fate to contribute to the growth of the economic system, to amass capital, not for purposes of his own happiness or salvation, but as an end in itself. Man became a cog in the vast economic machine – an important one if he had much capital, an insignificant one if he had none – but always a cog to serve a purpose outside of himself.”

Beyond the destruction of privacy on the job, the constant monitoring sets up formidable barriers to workplace organizing. Though labor relations law prohibits laws against labor union organizing, violations do not bring severe penalties and organizing remains suppressed.

One bright sign on the political horizon is that the union movement is being revived, and unions are beginning to resist. Collective bargaining is demanding transparency, allowing workers to know when and how monitoring is employed and requiring limits on its use. There are calls for legislation to curtail digital monitoring used in the workplace.

Though monitoring is defended by employers as enhancing productivity and preventing fraud, my own conviction is that norms guiding human relations in all venues, public and private, professional and personal, need to be humanistic ones.

Democracy, which is under threat as never before, begins not solely at the top of the political order, but at its roots. Democracy is the lifestyle of a free people that needs to be exercised where people spend eight hours a day at work tied to their survival.

The transformation of work into an environment in which the autonomy and privacy of the person are subordinated for non-human ends is the ultimate assault on freedom and democracy. It is a situation that requires much greater disclosure and demands its reversal. If not, we have taken another step on the road to fascism, and Orwell's nightmare will be fulfilled.