In part one of its review of union busting, written by Jo Constantz, Capital & Main examines how employers use technology to defeat unions.
It begins:
During a Zoom call set up by union representatives and employees who had organized a worker organizing committee, “We noticed that managers of the company had busted into the meeting — they had crashed our Zoom call,” recalls Lorena Lopez, a director of organizing with UNITE HERE Local 11. “Workers started to get very nervous and shut down their cameras so they wouldn’t be recognized. I was running the meeting and asked everyone to ID themselves. But the company people refused.” During the meeting, a worker on the cleaning crew had volunteered to be the spokesperson for the group. According to Lopez, this worker was confronted by management the next day and pressured to quit.
“They were spying on us — and it was easy to do via Zoom,” she says. Under a settlement agreement with the NLRB, the company agreed to post flyersinforming employers of their right to unionize and pledged not to ask them about organizing efforts and not to surveil their Zoom meetings. A lawyer for the company did not return requests for comment.
Workplace surveillance, already widespread in the U.S., has become even more prevalent during the pandemic as employers try to enforce public health measures and monitor remote workers. According to research by Gartner, a market research firm, 60% of large employers use workplace monitoring tools, twice as many as before the pandemic. Coworker.org, a labor research nonprofit, recently compiled a database of over 550 of these commercially available products, which it dubs “little tech,” and published a study outlining potential harms and noting the industry’s general lack of regulation.
Open the link and keep reading.
Best not to use workplace computers for anything outside work because virtually ALL of them are monitored these days.
The idea that only “60% of large employers use workplace monitoring tools” is simply ludicrous. That might have been plausible back in the 1990’s or even early 2000’s but only a complete sap would believe it is true today.
Rest assured, if you are using a workplace computer, you ARE being monitored. Or even if you are talking with a coworker at work, you are probably being monitored by a camera and microphone. To assume otherwise is just foolish.
Apart from not letting company officials in on your private life, there is a very good reason for not using workplace computers for anything other than work: you could be fired, since many companies have rules specifically forbidding such use.
Every keystroke.