I'm sure that's true for some industries and businesses, but obviously not true for all. Lots of very profitable companies employ low wage labourers (either dir

I'm sure that's true for some industries and businesses, but obviously not true for all. Lots of very profitable companies employ low wage labourers (either directly, or as is often the case, indirectly). Nike had $5.7 billion net income. But even if everything you say is true, we can still refer to these people as something slightly more humanizing than "number 17", and generally treat with a basic minimum of respect ("are you okay, work seems to have slower down" rather than immediately jumping to bollocking mode). Productivity monitoring for factory workers is nothing new, or even controversial as such, but having a camera pointed directly at your face all day that your supervisors can monitor is pretty invasive (never mind that this is just the "bum on seat" type of "productivity").