Surveilance at work
May 21 2007 18:20
I was watching some programme on bbc1 the other day which was celebrating the success of cctv and surveilance technology in catching criminals. One of the examples involved two blokes being spotted taking booze from the shop they worked in, the owner of the establishment had set up a hidden camera in the stockroom to watch the two while they worked.
Anyway it got me thinking about other forms of surveilance in the work place, not just cameras but other devices such as those computer devices that delivery drivers have to log all deliveries on and if i remember correctly also relay the area that the driver is in at any one time (does anyone know what theyre refered to?). theres other examples of surveilance being used to protect property such as Tescos plan to chip all products in order to stop warehouse staff trying to balance the scales.
Anyway can anyone else think of any other examples or forms of surveilance used on staff, if anyone knows of any class based critiques of surveilance that would also be helpful.
May 23 2007 08:55
#2
Supermarket retailers are renowned for other forms of surveillance. Cashiers' performance is monitored for scan rates - in fact 'league tables' used to be published of scan and accuracy productivity and also used to identify the cashier by name until there was significant kickback (I think that was T&G at Sainsburys, but it might have been USDAW, less likely though). It's also standard to monitor case rates particularly on night crews. At Safeway there was an entire Head Office department whose raison d'etre was to analyse jobs and work out optimal performance rates - inevitably the results were used as a method for managing performance/disciplining and dismissal together with setting staff budgets for the stores. Probably the most reviled department ever.
May 23 2007 17:40
#3
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 
May 24 2007 10:08
#4
^ Was it all under the guise of security?
Quote:
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
Sounds like a job for the bee watcher from hawtch. "Did i ever tell you how lucky you are" Dr. Seuss.
May 24 2007 10:39
#5
BB wrote:
^Was it all under the guise of security?
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.
Sep 20 2007 02:23
#6
Vaneigemappreciationclub wrote:
I was watching some programme on bbc1 the other day which was celebrating the success of cctv and surveilance technology in catching criminals. One of the examples involved two blokes being spotted taking booze from the shop they worked in, the owner of the establishment had set up a hidden camera in the stockroom to watch the two while they worked.
Anyway it got me thinking about other forms of surveilance in the work place, not just cameras but other devices such as those computer devices that delivery drivers have to log all deliveries on and if i remember correctly also relay the area that the driver is in at any one time (does anyone know what theyre refered to?). theres other examples of surveilance being used to protect property such as Tescos plan to chip all products in order to stop warehouse staff trying to balance the scales.
Anyway can anyone else think of any other examples or forms of surveilance used on staff, if anyone knows of any class based critiques of surveilance that would also be helpful.
is it not illegal to set up security cameras without an employees knowledge?
Anyways theres plenty of examples of monitoring at work, and most places in retail have surveillance. Usually this has a dual role for security purposes as people have noted, which obviously do also protect some workforces sometimes, especially late at night where cctv allows for a rapid response by police to drunken and/or violent customers for example, but theres generally a surveillance angle in there somewhere.
Sep 21 2007 17:03
#7
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.
Sep 22 2007 01:25
#8
I already posted this to another tread. But the TWIC (transport worker id card) is being instituted by the US Transportation Security Administration to track the movements of all transport workers. More than a regular government or employee ID this will contain bio-metric data and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to store personal information and to track us throughout our work sites and in the case of maritime workers throughout the world as we travel aboard our work vessels.
Its pretty creepy:
http://www.labournet.net/docks2/0709/mwm9.htm
http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/000189.html
Sep 22 2007 08:28
#9
cantdocartwheels wrote:
is it not illegal to set up security cameras without an employees knowledge?
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.
Sep 24 2007 04:53
#10
jef costello wrote:
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.
When did you work at Sainsburys? I worked there parttime until about 4 years ago and was never given any instruction about the rate of processing products. In fact, all the rhetoric we received was about the priority of customer service, cos Sainsburys at the time were making a real effort to cultivate a different image to "cheap and cheerful" Tesco and Asda. (I think they lost that battle to Waitrose though.) Checkout assistants were expected to simultaneously pack shopping unless the customer made it clear they didn't want them to, so really I'd literally say I had the opposite experience to you in that respect.
More relevantly though, I was once called into the supervisors office due to a transaction I did 2 weeks previously in which I accepted some out of date vouchers (why should i give a fuck? I think I was stoned at the time), in which I watched the CCTV footage of me doing the transaction. The manager concluded that the customers were "probably gypsies".
Also I wouldn't be so sure about the inefficiency of CCTV. I've heard a lot of stories about it (including a pretty hilarious joke in a Peep Show episode), but when I worked at Spar I know that the boss would come in every morning and watch the previous night's footage on fast forward.
Sep 24 2007 15:27
#11
Alan wrote:
jef costello wrote:
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.When did you work at Sainsburys? I worked there parttime until about 4 years ago and was never given any instruction about the rate of processing products. In fact, all the rhetoric we received was about the priority of customer service, cos Sainsburys at the time were making a real effort to cultivate a different image to "cheap and cheerful" Tesco and Asda. (I think they lost that battle to Waitrose though.) Checkout assistants were expected to simultaneously pack shopping unless the customer made it clear they didn't want them to, so really I'd literally say I had the opposite experience to you in that respect.
More relevantly though, I was once called into the supervisors office due to a transaction I did 2 weeks previously in which I accepted some out of date vouchers (why should i give a fuck? I think I was stoned at the time), in which I watched the CCTV footage of me doing the transaction. The manager concluded that the customers were "probably gypsies".
Also I wouldn't be so sure about the inefficiency of CCTV. I've heard a lot of stories about it (including a pretty hilarious joke in a Peep Show episode), but when I worked at Spar I know that the boss would come in every morning and watch the previous night's footage on fast forward.
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.
Sep 25 2007 02:43
#12
There was one camera over the till which was really shit (as in, I could be texting or reading [both of which were banned after repeat offences by yours truly] and my boss, sat in the office next to the camera, couldn't see me doing it) but they were buying a new one as I left. And then I think there was one in the stockroom and another in the office. Both of which were pretty hidden from view and the boss only watched when he was pretty sure noone would mosey in on him. They weren't that effective though, cos they were two thefts while I worked there: one from the safe (as in, someone blagged their way through the coded door to the stockroom, into the almost always occupied office and managed to unlock the cupboard and safe - inside job surely) and one from the till while the cashier continued serving unawares (incidentally I was supposed to work that shift but called in sick cos I was hungover).
Sep 25 2007 06:35
#13
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.
Alan wrote:
There was one camera over the till which was really shit ...
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.
Dec 2 2007 17:36
#14
Just seen this thread and thought I'd just send you a link to an article I wrote on this subject which has a few examples, some already mentioned. GMB union did some work on employee tracking in distribution centres (details linked to at end of article).
Cog in the Machine (tagging & tracking workers - which, and by who?)
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/03/335424.html
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.