Tracking Employees Electronically

Link to full article in Title

Who: Nearly ten thousand supermarket warehouse employees now, secretaries and others later

What: Employees wear small computers- these go on arms, wrists, or even fingers, or sometimes in specially wired vests. The computers tell the wearer where to go to pick up goods that need to be delivered, and orders can be directly beamed to the employee, skipping the middle man and shortening delivery times considerably. However, the stores can also track how long it ought to take the employee to do a job and 'spy' on employees to see if they are taking unauthorised breaks.

Where: Britain now, U.S. later

Concerns:

Academics are worried that the system could make Britain the most surveyed society in the world. The country already has the largest number of street security cameras.

Martin Dodge, a researcher at the centre for advanced spatial analysis at University College London, said: "These de vices mark the total 'disappearance of disappearance' where the employee is unable to do anything without the machine knowing or monitoring."

Why:

But the companies say the system makes the delivery of food more efficient, cuts out waste, reduces theft and can reorder goods more quickly.

...A spokeswoman for Tesco last night insisted that the company was not using the technology to monitor the staff and said it was making employees' work easier and reducing the need for paper.

Rebuttals:

Paul Kenny, acting general secretary [of a national union], said: "The GMB is no Luddite organisation but we will not stand idly by to see our members reduced to automatons. The use of this technology needs to be redesigned to be an aid to the worker rather than making the worker its slave.

"The supermarkets that rely on just-in-time shelf-filling rather than holding buffer stocks are incredibly prof itable companies. They can well afford to operate a humanised supply team."

So is Kenny tacitly admitting that the computer system saves the stores money? If they save money, might not some of those savings be passed on to the consumers? Perhaps not, but certainly, increased costs are passed on to the consumer.

Other monitoring devices are being developed in the US, including ones that can check on the productivity of secretaries by measuring the number of key strokes on their word processors; satellite technology is also being developed to monitor productivity in manufacturing jobs.

Two London firms are considering using satellites to direct sandwich board holders, making sure they are not shirking and moving them to areas with more people.

So is it Brave New World, or not? What do you think?