Employee refuses to download app that monitors location, says it got her fired

Sadly the UK are not the only European country with these types of aspirations. My best guess is that there are tightening relationships between the tops of the political and business classes in many countries. And they are beginning to realize they can engage in unmonitored corruption while running disinformation campaigns to cover their tracks. And then running for re-election on populist rhetoric to maintain the appearance that they are the opposite of their actual policies.

This happening on both the left and the right. Though I would say on the right the problem is considerably worse (this may just be my personal political bias, take it for what you will). The few people that are paying attention to this kind of misbehavior are the extremely informed. Who of course are a minority. Society is stratified across the globe and the very poor and poorly educated are being taken advantage of.

Most politicians don't believe they are engaging in corruption. But there are a limited number of government contracts to go around, the contracts are increasingly valuable, and on the demand side there are a growing number of humans and companies. At some point you might have half a dozen or even dozens of "qualified" looking applications for a government contract. And the procurement people within any given government usually end up picking between the many possible qualified looking applicants by the fact that someone has a social tie to the inside.

The only possible solution I can think of is accepting some type of randomization in the assignment of government contracts. Because proximity to power is way too important right now. And the politicians don't feel like they are engaging in corruptions they believe they are giving their friends who have risen through the meritocracy a deserved opportunity. There is some truth to this but the problem is their friends aren't the only people who have earned similar opportunities.

Maybe you pay him too little.

Maybe you should offer him additional contract pay. More he does, more he gets paid.

We should all be concerned, as employees and as citizens, of companies asking their staff to install monitoring applications (especially on their personal devices). These applications are not open-source, there is no way to audit what they do with the collected data. Worse, there is nothing preventing them from changing their collection, sharing, storage practices, and those employees would be unable to remove the said application because they would be fired.

What a sad world we live in, where employees are assumed to be slacking off (like you just did with your extremely caricatural comment) if they are not tracked. The relationship should be built on trust, and common interest, not fear.