Surveilance at work

Well, there's the one that a lot of us encounter every day while we're on libcom -- the ability that IT departments have to monitor internet usage. Also, some companies monitor the number of keystrokes per minute, just to make sure you're doing your data input fast enough.

There's also the lo-tech form of surveillance that the bosses try to force on us through the introduction of things like "team targets". These operate to undermine basic solidarity between workers by encouraging us to keep an eye on each other in case anyone's "slacking," and affecting the "team's" performance. These horizontal forms of surveillance are equally, if not more, insidious.

I used to work in the place where all the cheques in the country go while you're waiting for them to clear (it's in Northamtpon, just in case anyone's ever looking for somewhere to picket out that would really throw a spanner in the works.... ). There are a lot of different, equally tedious jobs that go into clearing cheques, and they'd give us these forms we had to carry with us wherever we went, with a code for each job that existed in the place. You had to account on this form for every minute you spent working, and how many 'units' you achieved of that particular job (eg how many bags of cheques you processed, or whatever - each job had a set number of 'units' that was considered to be what you should be shifting, and the targets were difficult). I can't imagine that anyone actually checked these forms, as it would have been hugely time-consuming and pretty pointless, or maybe they just examined the forms of people they suspected weren't pulling their weight, or people they wanted an excuse to fire for some other reason perhaps. But I think the main purpose was just to make you feel like you were being kept track of and should keep working hard all the time. Jesus that was a fucking awful job

No, they did have millions of cameras and shit everywhere but that was kind of understandable given the nature of the job. The forms had nothing to do with security though, they just measured individual work rates.

RFID is the thing you're thinking of VAC, there was a stink a few years ago because ASDA or Tesco was going to leave the chips in clothes activated and (potentially) track movements of customers within the store.

As far as I know they don't have to tell you about cameras, but I was under the impression that camera evidence was inadmissable in court, but that might be out of date now.

I'd imagine that if they do have to tell you then they tell a staf committee or something so no-one being spied on finds out about anything.

As Mag says they can't monitor a lot of the paper work. unless they computerise data entry, in which case you could try to fill in forms in such a way as computers will have trouble reading them. It's like cameras, supermarket I worked at had I reckoned about 200 with a maximum of one person in the control room who could have a maximum of four screens up at a time they were not much use unless they were expecting something.

wraeth, when I was at Sainsbury's I think it was 16 or 18 items per minute you were expected to put through the checkout.

In most cases it is, the only exception is where there's pretty clear evidence of criminality going on. You can't do it on the offchance.

Mind you, I heard there were plans to put cameras in the toilets at work to catch someone allegedly blocking the toilet with big turds. Perhaps that explains why Chuck Berry had cameras in the cubicles of the womens' toilets in his club.

I worked at Sainsbury's for more than a year and left maybe seven years ago. That was when they were trying to take on tesco on their own terms, I think the making life taste better thing came in around the time I was leaving. They told you all that shit about friendliness but they also set targets.
With the vouchers they wlould have picked that up on the computer and then gone back and found the footage. Which I doubt was clear enough to show the vouchers but would prove that it was you on the till when the vouchers went through.
If you watch the footage on fast torward you'll some things but not most. And how many cameras did you have? Did he watch all of them? If they have movement activated ones in stockrooms then they can be a bit risky if it's a slow traffic high cost area like BWS or something.

Here's an obvious one, that's been documented no end in academia and some places like Kolinko.

The call centre I work in records and listens to absolutely every single call that passes through it. The quality review sessions of you and a supervisor are more than tedious as a result. We sometimes get in the region of 1,500 calls in one day for one account, there are over 30 separate accounts - some of these are reviewed for confirmation of address and credit card details, matching what you type and the caller says.

Then they are again passed on for a second listen to a quality control person who tries to spot trends in your technique and call handling. You are of course tracked through a log on system as well as a typical swipe system as well.

The resultant paranoia as a result of the quality control can be a bit grating. Account specialists and some of the quality control staff are just other floor workers earning slightly more than you with a bulk load more of responsibility, so you never know who's listening to your calls and joking around with you one minute and lodging escalations and write ups against you the next.

There's also something of a ludicrous folk myth that the supervisors can still hear people chatting shite when there is no call on, so people rip in and out their head piece jacks when shooting the shit - knowing the difference between a linear line and what a wav file thats recording looks like I don't really fall for that.

Spotting mistakes is fine, fair enough from the managements view point - but as all of this is recorded through a basic Wav storage system on a programme that can let you listen back with no real difficulties, its absolutely retarded floor workers do not have access to their own voice seconds after taking a call in order to verify the details they've taken down. So much hassle results from this tedious little disciplinarian border.

Reluctance to draw attention to one self is the height of a prevailing counter-culture in the work place, and with the conditions being pretty damn good (very low call intake, at times I've had 11 in 2.5 hours, benefits, flexibility and a very lax absentee policy) there's not even a murmur of angst against anything more than repetition and boredom.

I hear from another Irish comrade that has sailed through a few agency jobs here that this lack of a kick against supervisors and management is pretty far gone in Canadian workplaces at the level of informality.

I was reading something the other day on alienation and labour process in Canadian industry, apparently a federal investigation in the eighties heavily railed against what passes for standard work place surveillance among "white collar" professions today as a drastic invasion of basic privacy rights. Not that they did fuck all about it...

The main metaphor used for this sort of call centre surveillance and management control through surveillance in general is that of Foucault’s panopticon.
You'll find fucking reams of material like this.

In a pretty damn good read called Organisational Misbehaviour, Stephen Ackroyd and Paul Thomspn complain that these sort of approaches while offering valuable insights, overwhelmingly grant all active agency to a management with the complete power of over-seeing/controlling employees. So they try flip the coin in uncovering workplace mis-behavior and images of active employees a step ahead of management in the workplace environments. There's an article from them addressing some of this in the library.

Guy I used to work with in Dublin got fired from his job one Sunday morning after the manager reviewed the tapes from the night before. He was the archetypal combination of scammer and solid worker, he was there so long the manager who was responsible for more than 5 or so Texaco filling stations was pretty dependent on him for the ins and outs of this particular garage, he'd do all the necessary informal on-job training for newbies as well as passing on the scams for free sandwiches and coffees from the Deli we shared it with.

On the late shift one Saturday some cops pulled up for service through the window and demanding two bottles of wine for people in the station up the road.

"Ah lads, you know yourself it's well after hours," he tells them

They proceeded to pull the usual patronizing combination of barely concealed aggresion scattered amidst "seen it all/wink wink" lad-ish hokum and threats of reporting him to his manager who'd hate to lose the custom of the station up the road.

He caved in and served them the two bottles of wine - next day, the manager checked the tapes and fired him for serving after hours.