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WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

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191–200 of 367 posts

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#191

Post by jclulow »

tomcam wrote: post #173
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "basic" in basic income isn't there for decoration: just taking UBI and not working would probably be about as comfortable as living on something like Universal Credit in the UK, minus the adversarial means-testing, which is to say, "not very". Certainly I wouldn't characterise it as "easy wealth", more like "easy bare minimum so you don't have to worry about starvation". Besides, if it was that much gloriously e…

How is means testing adversarial?

The purest idealistic version of means testing may well be fine in theory, but in practice means testing is universally co-opted by conservative governments to make it difficult or impossible for the people with the least resources (and thus most in need of the benefits) to actually get them.

The Australian Centrelink programme is a pretty good example of what happens: one government introduces a system of unemployment benefits and then later a different conservative government (whose members and voting base don't like poor people) are able to pervert the system through means testing provisions and other bureaucratic hurdles to effectively prevent a large subset of eligible persons from actually collecting the benefits to which they are entitled, but without having to deal with the political fallout of actually ending or reducing benefits on paper.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#192

Post by Swizec »

majormajor wrote: post #188
Swizec wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I’m from Europe, have lived in US the past 8 years) > Is there a concept equivalent to US, salary employee? Yes. It’s called full-time employee. This encompasses anyone and everyone who does not work as an independent contractor. > If so what are they expected to work? 40 hours per week. With mandated minimum lunch time and breaks, paid minimum vacation, paid medical leave, paid maternity/paternity, govt mandated lu…

"Salary" or "exempt" in the US is a sub-status of "Full Time Employee". FTE in the US has much of the same of what you say - less, but still some protections, most significantly requirements around paying overtime, and paying more for it: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/overtime - "Unless exempt, employees covered by the Act must receive overtime pay for hours worked over 40 in a workweek at a rate not less than tim…

> where you don't have max hours or overtime eligibility at all?

No, the EU is pretty strict about those things. Only way you can be ineligible for overtime is if you own the business. And even then you’re technically eligible, but I’ve never heard of anyone paying themselves overtime.

In practice the “exempt” part happens in a grey area: The boss and the employee shake hands to “make things simpler” and write down 40h every week in whatever tracking thingy. Worked less than 40? Great, you get 40. Worked more? Great, you get 40. wink wink

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#193

Post by bombolo »

codegeek wrote: post #189
2devnull wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people don’t want to work. They’ve told me so. I think UBI would destroy these people, like easy wealth does to the newly rich. A better solution is to focus on worker’s rights and labor regulations. Of course that opens the internationalism question, but so too would ubi.

Free money is never going to solve anything. I don't mind helping people in need but just handing out money to people especially the ones that are already lazy wouldn't solve a thing. Instead, we should focus on getting people to work. Whatever that takes. We should reward those who want to work and penalize those who don't. If you can't work due to a real disability, you should be helped.

> Whatever that takes.

Ah, the old whip, yes… -_-'

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#195

Post by shon »

The motivation behind this is always interesting to me. When managing, I try to find simple measurable work-output metrics, establish them clearly, and give people as much freedom as possible outside of getting work done.

I hated being micromanaged as an employee . Plus as a manger I’m not detail-oriented enough to micromanage anyone.

It reminds me of a blog I wrote in 2004 while working at Peoplesoft: https://web.archive.org/web/20051104174256/http://www.shon.o...

TLDR: If the lights were on in your office, you were working, even if you weren’t really there. So the game was to figure out a way to keep your lights on without being there and the blog was about that nearly 20 years ago.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#196

Post by TheDudeMan »

heyoni wrote: post #180
rr808 wrote: post #171

Honestly lots of people are doing miminal hours WFH, not just IT, all office workers. I think companies really dont know what to do about it.

What’s there to do? If the work is getting done then enjoy the morale boost.

Which business are in you that doesn't benefit from more work / more efficient work?

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#197

Post by bombolo »

eropple wrote: post #119
wizofaus wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxation is quite separate though - we all have the same access to government provided services and infrastructure regardless of how much income tax we pay, I don't see anybody arguing that's unfair.

Those with the most to lose benefit the most from having a just and civil society, but that realization never seems to percolate through.

uh? the rich don't want a just society, they just want to remain rich…

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#198

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

joezydeco wrote: post #6

Now that Microsoft owns LinkedIn, I wouldn't trust them one bit to keep your activity there away from your employer. It would be really easy to correlate your sentiment analysis on Teams/email against your LI messaging traffic.

Now that there's a tick box in Outlook to tie your surveilled corporate account to your real-life personal account on LinkedIn -- combined with the fact that we know that Microsoft aggregates our "productivity" data to allow companies to compare their scores -- do people really think that Microsoft ISN'T selling a person's "productivity" scores from their previous and current employers to potential recruiters?

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#199

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

Haemm0r wrote: post #177
SoftTalker wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you paid by the hour? Any job I've ever had with such rigid time tracking requirements was a hourly paid position. This sort of thing backfires on the employer in my opinion. It's quite easy to stretch a task to fill 8 hours if you have to be there anyway. But maybe you'd be happy to clock out after 5 hours one day and take a few extra unpaid hours for yourself. If your work is done, the employer should be happy…

Quite sure he is. Usually All-In contracts don't log their time in Austria.

Nope, regular employee.

All work time is tracked by law in Austria, it's just that all-in is less invasive on the time tracking because it doesn't care for overtime because it's not paid.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#200

Post by flir »

guy98238710 wrote: post #112
2devnull wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people don’t want to work. They’ve told me so. I think UBI would destroy these people, like easy wealth does to the newly rich. A better solution is to focus on worker’s rights and labor regulations. Of course that opens the internationalism question, but so too would ubi.

Huh, UBI has its own moral panic. Never thought I would see that, but it seems obvious in retrospect. Both capitalism and communism worship work like some insane religion. If you work, you are a good person. If you don't, you are scum.

Protestant work ethic, innit. Both Capitalism and Communism are economic systems born of Northern Europe.
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