7 ms·

A great thing to unionize over. If you just quit your job eventually the equilibrium of the system will probably result in most jobs having this surveillance ov

A great thing to unionize over. If you just quit your job eventually the equilibrium of the system will probably result in most jobs having this surveillance over time. You need to fight it directly with coordinated work stoppages. The reason the system will equilibriate is that at first you'll have your pick of many more jobs. However, certain employers at the margins try it first, then more prestigious ones that keep their employees there with golden handcuffs. Then the rest follow the prestigious ones until there are few jobs without it and your individualist strategy has no where to turn.

throwoutway 5y ago
Can we just unionize against _this one topic_ and not the other baggage that unions bring?
- tehjoker 5y ago
  I think you'll find that unions are defined as democratic organizations of workers and so they will be whatever you and your colleagues want them to be. There is also a legal framework established to keep labor peace, but you don't have to be peaceful (in the sense of not resisting) if you don't want to.
  - gadflyinyoureye 5y ago
    Something that gets lost in the US is that the Union is made up of members. Many Americans appear to have the idea that the Union is the HR department for the employees. As a result, members often stop attending meetings, advocating for policies, etc. The unions devolve into a corrupt body because the lax democratic oversight allows a populist leader to provide just enough bread and circus to member while lining his or her own pocket.
    - BrazzVuvuzela 5y ago
      The problem union advocates in America have is whenever things don't go their way, they immediately resort to calling the workers idiots. The workers aren't idiots. When they perceive that unions aren't listening to them, it's usually because that's true. The union corruption and contempt for workers is the cause, not the consequence, of workers giving up on unions.
      - sofixa 5y ago
        But union heads are elected by union members, aka workers. If the latter consider the former to be corrupt, they have the power to change that.
        BrazzVuvuzela 5y ago
        Voting in a union like the teamsters might as well be pissing into the wind. The ability of any individual worker to change the way things work is academic at best, particularly in the big unions. Practically speaking, the most choice a worker has is to vote against the union in their shop, since their shop is much smaller than the union itself. Suppose you've got a shop with a hundred workers, and a union representing a million workers wants you to join. In the initial vote of whether or not to join, each worker has a hundredth of the decision making power. After they join, each worker only has one millionth of the decision making power. The only meaningful choice is whether or not to join that union; after you join you're going along for the ride with no real input into it.
      - tehjoker 5y ago
        lol what do you think the bosses do when things don't go their way?
        BrazzVuvuzela 5y ago
        Get a union and now you have twice as much of that, contempt from your boss and the union. Flagging for disagreement? Nice. Shit like this only makes me dislike unions and their advocates even more. When arguments don't go their way and their tactic of insulting people has already been called out, they resort to silencing tactics. Unfortunate for you that you don't know where I live, so the old classic of "brick through your livingroom window" isn't an option for you!
  - wyager 5y ago
    > I think you'll find that unions are... whatever you and your colleagues want them to be This is not a realistic model at all. The kind of people who tend to accumulate power in unions, especially more white collar unions, do not tend to be the same kind of person or have the same personal or political goals as the people they nominally represent. Fledgeling tech unions in particular seem terrible here; I don't get the sense that they represent my interests as a tech worker at all, but rather that they come with a ton of political baggage and they only want my membership as a pretense for demanding random crap that I don't care about and doesn't benefit me. For example, the (unpopular) Alphabet Union "aims to stop Google from allowing its social media platforms such as YouTube to function as a hub for right-wing extremism and white supremacy". It has nothing to do with improving the material working conditions of union members.
    - tehjoker 5y ago
      I suspect that you and I disagree on the politics, but it sounds to me that the unions haven't found the right issue yet that is broadly appealing enough. This issue of surveillance might be one.
      - wyager 5y ago
        My non-political normative belief is that unions should represent the interests of their members in their capacity as an employee working under the union. Stopping employers from spying on employees would definitely fall under this description. Again, I just haven't seen any tech unionization efforts in the US that legitimately seem to care about workers instead of using them as a pretense to accumulate power towards some other end.
        tehjoker 5y ago
        Well, I do agree they should represent their members' interests. I will aver that fighting alongside your fellow workers builds class consciousness and progressive values, but that's up to you and your colleagues.
    - kmonsen 5y ago
- sli 5y ago
  Nope. I'd much rather unionize for better wages, better conditions (that includes this topic), collective bargaining, and to wrench some of the power back to the people doing the actual work. Not every software developer is making six figures working for FAANG, some of them have to put up with some awful conditions, and the whole "just get another job, it's not that difficult" attitude is a bubble that a lot of HN lives in. In short, I want democracy to extend to the workplace. The line we've drawn is artificial and one-sided.
  - melony 5y ago
    It is people like you that drive high earners away from unions. Single issue unionization is a lot more important for upper middle class. If you cannot get enough high income workers to buy-in, then your plan is dead on arrival. Bernie will be proud. Not everyone cares about the social justice issue du jour, most people just want more money. Ultimately, any union plan must show clear benefits and right now if you are earning more than 6 figures, unions are nothing but a waste of time and money. You have yet to demonstrate that an upper class union can go beyond crabs in a bucket gatekeeping.
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      > Single issue unionization is a lot more important for upper middle class. It's just not particularly valuable.
  - derekp7 5y ago
    The problem people have with unions is that many of them elevate the lower performers by pushing down the higher performers. The higher performers have leverage already without a union. Of course this only works when there are more positions open that benefit from high performers than there is supply of high performing workers. Many tech workers believe this will be the case for some time to come. What would work better is if a union could allow for varying wages based on skill set. The problem here is demonstrating that skill, as often times it is difficult to objectively measure.
    - 5y ago
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Countries with high union participation rates have not seen nearly the divergence between wage growth and productivity growth over time that the US has. There's tons of data on this. Unions are good, union participation is good.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    This statistic isn't enough to say whether unions are good or bad, even if you assume there's causation. How do you know they don't do that by slowing down productivity growth, rather than by speeding up wage growth?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
mc32 5y ago
That guy, a vishal garg, who fired 900 employees, domestically and internationally --most of them were not developers/programmers, etc. Just run of the mill white collar workers --who presumably he had statistics on given he mentioned many "only worked two hours while claiming eight". So... like everyone who works using a computer then would have to be unionized?
- tehjoker 5y ago
  Well, (a) management lies but it's possible and (b) bigger unions are better!
- zhte415 5y ago
  I don't know this story, but didn't they consider firing themselves or their one downs who led this state to exist, if it really did. 900 is not a huge number in Operations. Given a span of control of 10-20 per team per manager, and around 5-8 managers per senior manager, that's about 8 people for them to be managing directly, perhaps add 3-4 as heads of admin or automation functions with small teams then that's an incredibly typical Operations office, at least with boilerplate span of control recommendations that come out of McKinsey, BCG etc (indeed I have problems with these, but it is 'standard'). Was everyone lying to this Head? Did they create a culture of busywork? Did it become a dysfunctional closed shop impervious to supervision? Did the Head at least know their two-downs' names or ever have a chat, or the offer of one?
- onion2k 5y ago
  Just run of the mill white collar workers --who presumably he had statistics on given he mentioned many "only worked two hours while claiming eight". He claimed that at the same time as firing 900 people. To me it sounded much more like his internal justification for his actions rather than something that was true. Essentially I believe he was mentally shifting the blame from his own failing to successfully run a company that could profitably utilise 900 people, to making it the workers fault that he had to fire them. The fact that he doesn't appear to be replacing the workers shows there wasn't work to be done. Is it your fault if you do all the work required of you in 2 hours?
moeris 5y ago
> However, certain employers at the margins try it first, then more prestigious ones... A slippery slope argument. The fact that there exists a gradient of willingness to monitor remotely isn't a sufficient (or even necessary) condition to guarantee that most workers will be monitored: equilibriums can be established at 0% or 100% or anything in between. If remote monitoring isn't tolerated by individuals, I don't think it would become a prevalent practice, even without coordinated collective action. Apply your logic to pay. Some employers pay very low wages. Others pay high wages. If you just quit your job, will the system reach an equilibrium with low wages? No, in fact, we know that wages in tech are quite high.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  > in fact, we know that wages in tech are quite high. Are they? Compared to what a janitor makes or compared to what management makes? Compared to what they would be if they hadn't been held back by anti-poaching agreements in the bay area?
- tehjoker 5y ago
  You guys will do anything to avoid even considering collective action because you want to hope you don't have to do anything. Hope doesn't guarantee results.
lostcolony 5y ago
I disagree. This sort of thing costs the company money, opens them up to possible legal issues, and doesn't actually do anything to improve performance. The companies that understand that "butts in seats" does not equate to performance will not use this, as such. If those aren't currently the most prestigious, they likely will become so, because they care about doing things that bring results, not merely make bad managers happy. Because of that, while there's an uptick right now, I don't see it lasting; I certainly don't see it taking over.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  This is a "just so" story.
  - lostcolony 5y ago
    So is your parent post on how monitoring will take over if devs don't unionize.
    - tehjoker 5y ago
      Perhaps, but do you really think developers are different from every other kind of employee? While we are well paid, the overarching story has been to systematize the work and increase the number of workers in an effort to drive down costs and increase management control. I think it's naïve to think this trend will lead to companies making wise decisions that cede additional control to workers. After all, this isn't speculation, we're discussing an article where 1/3 of workers are already subject to it! The main thing that has made our profession different is that the work is intellectually difficult and requires a lot of training. If you think similar knowledge work jobs aren't subject to such pressures, I know a doctor that is freaking out about how they are training nurse practitioners in online schools to take away hospitalist jobs.
      - lostcolony 5y ago
        No, but I think everyone being forced to work remotely due to a worldwide pandemic -is- unique. The switch was not a carefully considered bought into thing, and companies are reacting to it with what they think they need, not what they actually find they need. You call out 1/3 of workers are already subject to it; I will call out that despite almost -every- company going from "I can see who is in the office, at their computer, and I can walk by and get an idea if they're just doomscrolling Facebook, or at least staring at an IDE" to "now I can't tell at all what they're doing", a full 2/3rds of companies, in the UK (a country that already has a culture of passive surveillance, with cameras on most urban street corners and the like) -haven't- instituted such measures. As time goes on, will that 2/3rds of companies also buy in? Maybe, if they find they can't actually determine who is and isn't producing. But that has always been a challenge with knowledge workers, and the move to remote hasn't actually changed that calculus at all. What -is- certain is that increased monitoring, especially in countries that historically have objected to it (such as the US, which is also a leader in the industry when it comes to establishing trends), has a cost, both monetarily and in morale. If companies don't see a return on investment, the push for it will likely subside, and it becomes something to cut for the sake of budgets, if not also competitiveness in attracting talent. I will also point out, pre-COVID, most companies didn't actually track time spent in office for knowledge workers. While blue collar employees would clock in and out to ensure they were putting in the hours, and service industry employees would, necessarily, have specific hours they worked, knowledge workers such as devs (a very different category of beast than doctor or nurse, who though knowledgeable and highly trained, are not actually knowledge workers. A nurse is not nursing if they're staring into space thinking about their patient. They are more like service industry in that regard, working well defined shifts that require manpower. Same doctors; there are appointments and scheduled events they have to attend and do. You can't replace a surgery, unlike many meetings, with an email) generally have had no such measures, despite it being no more difficult to institute them. Why? Because companies realized that attendance is not a proxy for performance. The fact a bunch of bad 'leaders', faced with the most singular workplace disruption of our lifetime (hopefully), reacted poorly in trying to pretend it is, doesn't tell us anything about long term trends.
winternett 5y ago
An employer owns your productivity, not you for the 8 hours (or whatever logged time) you work a day. "Owning people" in the classic sense (even during limited periods of working hours) is slavery, and that's not legal (any more, at least). Through over 20 years of work in IT, I've learned that managers get this wrong far too often. Even performance reports are direct evidence of deep breaches of personal rights. The model of employees not being able to use personal time as guaranteed by law, Surveillance tactics, hostile work environments, etc... have all been rampant in US culture forever. If you're entry level you're a beast of burden, and deeply entrenched in proving yourself and solving critical problems, also at the mercy of accountability and almost always underpaid... At the "trusted top" they're playing golf on the clock and getting golden parachutes even if they under-perform... There is a better balance than this. Now I'm not into a chaotic work protest as much as anyone else, but the truth is that even the poorest and least powerful masses can overwhelm and conquer any small handful of wealthy elites if they say "Let them eat cake" as history has shown... We're facing a huge breakdown of everything that makes the world work unless people re-align their perspectives of equality and fairness in labor, and it's a lot bigger than just a few employees unionizing. Employers own the productivity that employees agree to delivering, and if there is a performance issue, then there's already plenty of precedent to handle that. Expecting an employee to work every minute of an 8 hour day is insane, and not remotely realistic, even if they are a horse. Employers adding surveillance to the mix only highlights the encroachment of the slave owner mentality in employment, and it could easily create a lawsuit over mis-use and abuse, and it probably will end up in court soon in a very public manner. It's probably the USB "self-moving mouse" that created all this hype to be honest, but it's still a necessary move for many.

throwoutway 5y ago

Can we just unionize against _this one topic_ and not the other baggage that unions bring?

tehjoker 5y ago
I think you'll find that unions are defined as democratic organizations of workers and so they will be whatever you and your colleagues want them to be. There is also a legal framework established to keep labor peace, but you don't have to be peaceful (in the sense of not resisting) if you don't want to.
- gadflyinyoureye 5y ago
  Something that gets lost in the US is that the Union is made up of members. Many Americans appear to have the idea that the Union is the HR department for the employees. As a result, members often stop attending meetings, advocating for policies, etc. The unions devolve into a corrupt body because the lax democratic oversight allows a populist leader to provide just enough bread and circus to member while lining his or her own pocket.
  - BrazzVuvuzela 5y ago
    The problem union advocates in America have is whenever things don't go their way, they immediately resort to calling the workers idiots. The workers aren't idiots. When they perceive that unions aren't listening to them, it's usually because that's true. The union corruption and contempt for workers is the cause, not the consequence, of workers giving up on unions.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      But union heads are elected by union members, aka workers. If the latter consider the former to be corrupt, they have the power to change that.
      - BrazzVuvuzela 5y ago
        Voting in a union like the teamsters might as well be pissing into the wind. The ability of any individual worker to change the way things work is academic at best, particularly in the big unions. Practically speaking, the most choice a worker has is to vote against the union in their shop, since their shop is much smaller than the union itself. Suppose you've got a shop with a hundred workers, and a union representing a million workers wants you to join. In the initial vote of whether or not to join, each worker has a hundredth of the decision making power. After they join, each worker only has one millionth of the decision making power. The only meaningful choice is whether or not to join that union; after you join you're going along for the ride with no real input into it.
    - tehjoker 5y ago
      lol what do you think the bosses do when things don't go their way?
      - BrazzVuvuzela 5y ago
        Get a union and now you have twice as much of that, contempt from your boss and the union. Flagging for disagreement? Nice. Shit like this only makes me dislike unions and their advocates even more. When arguments don't go their way and their tactic of insulting people has already been called out, they resort to silencing tactics. Unfortunate for you that you don't know where I live, so the old classic of "brick through your livingroom window" isn't an option for you!
- wyager 5y ago
  > I think you'll find that unions are... whatever you and your colleagues want them to be This is not a realistic model at all. The kind of people who tend to accumulate power in unions, especially more white collar unions, do not tend to be the same kind of person or have the same personal or political goals as the people they nominally represent. Fledgeling tech unions in particular seem terrible here; I don't get the sense that they represent my interests as a tech worker at all, but rather that they come with a ton of political baggage and they only want my membership as a pretense for demanding random crap that I don't care about and doesn't benefit me. For example, the (unpopular) Alphabet Union "aims to stop Google from allowing its social media platforms such as YouTube to function as a hub for right-wing extremism and white supremacy". It has nothing to do with improving the material working conditions of union members.
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    I suspect that you and I disagree on the politics, but it sounds to me that the unions haven't found the right issue yet that is broadly appealing enough. This issue of surveillance might be one.
    - wyager 5y ago
      My non-political normative belief is that unions should represent the interests of their members in their capacity as an employee working under the union. Stopping employers from spying on employees would definitely fall under this description. Again, I just haven't seen any tech unionization efforts in the US that legitimately seem to care about workers instead of using them as a pretense to accumulate power towards some other end.
      - tehjoker 5y ago
        Well, I do agree they should represent their members' interests. I will aver that fighting alongside your fellow workers builds class consciousness and progressive values, but that's up to you and your colleagues.
  - kmonsen 5y ago
sli 5y ago
Nope. I'd much rather unionize for better wages, better conditions (that includes this topic), collective bargaining, and to wrench some of the power back to the people doing the actual work. Not every software developer is making six figures working for FAANG, some of them have to put up with some awful conditions, and the whole "just get another job, it's not that difficult" attitude is a bubble that a lot of HN lives in. In short, I want democracy to extend to the workplace. The line we've drawn is artificial and one-sided.
- melony 5y ago
  It is people like you that drive high earners away from unions. Single issue unionization is a lot more important for upper middle class. If you cannot get enough high income workers to buy-in, then your plan is dead on arrival. Bernie will be proud. Not everyone cares about the social justice issue du jour, most people just want more money. Ultimately, any union plan must show clear benefits and right now if you are earning more than 6 figures, unions are nothing but a waste of time and money. You have yet to demonstrate that an upper class union can go beyond crabs in a bucket gatekeeping.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    > Single issue unionization is a lot more important for upper middle class. It's just not particularly valuable.
- derekp7 5y ago
  The problem people have with unions is that many of them elevate the lower performers by pushing down the higher performers. The higher performers have leverage already without a union. Of course this only works when there are more positions open that benefit from high performers than there is supply of high performing workers. Many tech workers believe this will be the case for some time to come. What would work better is if a union could allow for varying wages based on skill set. The problem here is demonstrating that skill, as often times it is difficult to objectively measure.
  - 5y ago
arcticbull 5y ago
Countries with high union participation rates have not seen nearly the divergence between wage growth and productivity growth over time that the US has. There's tons of data on this. Unions are good, union participation is good.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  This statistic isn't enough to say whether unions are good or bad, even if you assume there's causation. How do you know they don't do that by slowing down productivity growth, rather than by speeding up wage growth?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

mc32 5y ago

That guy, a vishal garg, who fired 900 employees, domestically and internationally --most of them were not developers/programmers, etc. Just run of the mill white collar workers --who presumably he had statistics on given he mentioned many "only worked two hours while claiming eight". So... like everyone who works using a computer then would have to be unionized?

tehjoker 5y ago
Well, (a) management lies but it's possible and (b) bigger unions are better!
zhte415 5y ago
I don't know this story, but didn't they consider firing themselves or their one downs who led this state to exist, if it really did. 900 is not a huge number in Operations. Given a span of control of 10-20 per team per manager, and around 5-8 managers per senior manager, that's about 8 people for them to be managing directly, perhaps add 3-4 as heads of admin or automation functions with small teams then that's an incredibly typical Operations office, at least with boilerplate span of control recommendations that come out of McKinsey, BCG etc (indeed I have problems with these, but it is 'standard'). Was everyone lying to this Head? Did they create a culture of busywork? Did it become a dysfunctional closed shop impervious to supervision? Did the Head at least know their two-downs' names or ever have a chat, or the offer of one?
onion2k 5y ago
Just run of the mill white collar workers --who presumably he had statistics on given he mentioned many "only worked two hours while claiming eight". He claimed that at the same time as firing 900 people. To me it sounded much more like his internal justification for his actions rather than something that was true. Essentially I believe he was mentally shifting the blame from his own failing to successfully run a company that could profitably utilise 900 people, to making it the workers fault that he had to fire them. The fact that he doesn't appear to be replacing the workers shows there wasn't work to be done. Is it your fault if you do all the work required of you in 2 hours?

moeris 5y ago

> However, certain employers at the margins try it first, then more prestigious ones... A slippery slope argument. The fact that there exists a gradient of willingness to monitor remotely isn't a sufficient (or even necessary) condition to guarantee that most workers will be monitored: equilibriums can be established at 0% or 100% or anything in between. If remote monitoring isn't tolerated by individuals, I don't think it would become a prevalent practice, even without coordinated collective action. Apply your logic to pay. Some employers pay very low wages. Others pay high wages. If you just quit your job, will the system reach an equilibrium with low wages? No, in fact, we know that wages in tech are quite high.

HWR_14 5y ago
> in fact, we know that wages in tech are quite high. Are they? Compared to what a janitor makes or compared to what management makes? Compared to what they would be if they hadn't been held back by anti-poaching agreements in the bay area?
tehjoker 5y ago
You guys will do anything to avoid even considering collective action because you want to hope you don't have to do anything. Hope doesn't guarantee results.

lostcolony 5y ago

I disagree. This sort of thing costs the company money, opens them up to possible legal issues, and doesn't actually do anything to improve performance. The companies that understand that "butts in seats" does not equate to performance will not use this, as such. If those aren't currently the most prestigious, they likely will become so, because they care about doing things that bring results, not merely make bad managers happy. Because of that, while there's an uptick right now, I don't see it lasting; I certainly don't see it taking over.

tehjoker 5y ago
This is a "just so" story.
- lostcolony 5y ago
  So is your parent post on how monitoring will take over if devs don't unionize.
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    Perhaps, but do you really think developers are different from every other kind of employee? While we are well paid, the overarching story has been to systematize the work and increase the number of workers in an effort to drive down costs and increase management control. I think it's naïve to think this trend will lead to companies making wise decisions that cede additional control to workers. After all, this isn't speculation, we're discussing an article where 1/3 of workers are already subject to it! The main thing that has made our profession different is that the work is intellectually difficult and requires a lot of training. If you think similar knowledge work jobs aren't subject to such pressures, I know a doctor that is freaking out about how they are training nurse practitioners in online schools to take away hospitalist jobs.
    - lostcolony 5y ago
      No, but I think everyone being forced to work remotely due to a worldwide pandemic -is- unique. The switch was not a carefully considered bought into thing, and companies are reacting to it with what they think they need, not what they actually find they need. You call out 1/3 of workers are already subject to it; I will call out that despite almost -every- company going from "I can see who is in the office, at their computer, and I can walk by and get an idea if they're just doomscrolling Facebook, or at least staring at an IDE" to "now I can't tell at all what they're doing", a full 2/3rds of companies, in the UK (a country that already has a culture of passive surveillance, with cameras on most urban street corners and the like) -haven't- instituted such measures. As time goes on, will that 2/3rds of companies also buy in? Maybe, if they find they can't actually determine who is and isn't producing. But that has always been a challenge with knowledge workers, and the move to remote hasn't actually changed that calculus at all. What -is- certain is that increased monitoring, especially in countries that historically have objected to it (such as the US, which is also a leader in the industry when it comes to establishing trends), has a cost, both monetarily and in morale. If companies don't see a return on investment, the push for it will likely subside, and it becomes something to cut for the sake of budgets, if not also competitiveness in attracting talent. I will also point out, pre-COVID, most companies didn't actually track time spent in office for knowledge workers. While blue collar employees would clock in and out to ensure they were putting in the hours, and service industry employees would, necessarily, have specific hours they worked, knowledge workers such as devs (a very different category of beast than doctor or nurse, who though knowledgeable and highly trained, are not actually knowledge workers. A nurse is not nursing if they're staring into space thinking about their patient. They are more like service industry in that regard, working well defined shifts that require manpower. Same doctors; there are appointments and scheduled events they have to attend and do. You can't replace a surgery, unlike many meetings, with an email) generally have had no such measures, despite it being no more difficult to institute them. Why? Because companies realized that attendance is not a proxy for performance. The fact a bunch of bad 'leaders', faced with the most singular workplace disruption of our lifetime (hopefully), reacted poorly in trying to pretend it is, doesn't tell us anything about long term trends.

winternett 5y ago

An employer owns your productivity, not you for the 8 hours (or whatever logged time) you work a day. "Owning people" in the classic sense (even during limited periods of working hours) is slavery, and that's not legal (any more, at least). Through over 20 years of work in IT, I've learned that managers get this wrong far too often. Even performance reports are direct evidence of deep breaches of personal rights. The model of employees not being able to use personal time as guaranteed by law, Surveillance tactics, hostile work environments, etc... have all been rampant in US culture forever. If you're entry level you're a beast of burden, and deeply entrenched in proving yourself and solving critical problems, also at the mercy of accountability and almost always underpaid... At the "trusted top" they're playing golf on the clock and getting golden parachutes even if they under-perform... There is a better balance than this. Now I'm not into a chaotic work protest as much as anyone else, but the truth is that even the poorest and least powerful masses can overwhelm and conquer any small handful of wealthy elites if they say "Let them eat cake" as history has shown... We're facing a huge breakdown of everything that makes the world work unless people re-align their perspectives of equality and fairness in labor, and it's a lot bigger than just a few employees unionizing. Employers own the productivity that employees agree to delivering, and if there is a performance issue, then there's already plenty of precedent to handle that. Expecting an employee to work every minute of an 8 hour day is insane, and not remotely realistic, even if they are a horse. Employers adding surveillance to the mix only highlights the encroachment of the slave owner mentality in employment, and it could easily create a lawsuit over mis-use and abuse, and it probably will end up in court soon in a very public manner. It's probably the USB "self-moving mouse" that created all this hype to be honest, but it's still a necessary move for many.