Thread by @WolfieChristl

"In lower-paying jobs, the monitoring is already ubiquitous ... Now digital productivity monitoring is also spreading among white-collar jobs"

Huge NYT report on how US workers are "being tracked, recorded and ranked" across industries and incomes:
nytimes.com/interactive/20…

"Eight of the 10 largest private US employers track the productivity metrics of individual workers, many in real time". They "are subject to trackers, scores, 'idle' buttons, or just quiet, constantly accumulating records. Pauses can lead to penalties, from lost pay to lost jobs"

"In interviews and in hundreds of written submissions to The Times, white-collar workers described being tracked as 'demoralizing,' 'humiliating' and 'toxic' ... But the most urgent complaint, spanning industries and incomes, is that the working world’s new clocks are just wrong"

"UnitedHealth social workers were marked idle for lack of keyboard activity while counseling patients in drug treatment facilities", and "rated 1 to 5 based on the amount of time they were digitally engaged — numbers that affected compensation" #wtf

"Architects, academic administrators, doctors, nursing home workers and lawyers described growing electronic surveillance over every minute"

"Some radiologists see scoreboards showing their 'inactivity' time and how their productivity stacks up against their colleagues’"

"At financial firms, monitoring software set up for compliance reasons also served up insights on how employees spent their time"

New York's MTA "told engineers and other employees they could work remotely one day a week if they agreed to full-time productivity monitoring"

Hospice productivity tracking aka the gamification of 'spiritual care for the dying':

"Every morning the chaplains would share on a spreadsheet the number of 'productivity points' they anticipated earning. Every evening, software would calculate whether they had met their goals"

"A visit to the dying: as little as one point. Participating in a funeral: one and three-quarters points. A phone call to grieving relatives: one-quarter point ... But dying defied planning. Patients broke down, canceled appointments, drew final breaths"

"This left the clergy scrambling and in a perpetual dilemma. 'Do I see the patients who earn the points or do I see the patients who really need to be seen?'
...
Group settings like nursing homes were rich sources of points. Single patients in homes ... were not"

It's telling that the former VP workplace intelligence and MS 365 data strategy at Microsoft, who oversaw Office, Outlook, Teams etc turning into a cloud-based surveillance machine that provides employers with all kinds of shady metrics + intrusive data/APIs, is quoted like that.