Blown To Bits

Work at Home, While Your Employer Watches You

Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 by Harry Lewis
Before buy generic atarax the test, medical staff may ask a person to remove buy betnovate without prescription all jewelry, tight clothing, and clothes above the waist. The (metacam) online without a prescription tilt table test helps determine whether changes in position cause generic clonidine loss of consciousness and why. A tilt table test involves pharmacy cialis strapping a person to a table and moving it from acomplia online cheap a lying position to upright. These effects can make it purchase buy work more difficult for the heart to pump blood to the accutane prescription rest of the body, place strain on the heart and buy cheap zoloft online lungs, and disrupt typical heart rhythms. However, without a previous generic nasonex history of cardiac arrest, predicting sudden cardiac death can be find viagra on internet difficult. However, this relies on people being aware of any purchase arcoxia work underlying heart abnormalities, or risks for heart abnormalities, and receiving buy generic aldactone alternative liquid appropriate treatment. The American Heart Association (AHA) currently recommends screening buy online side effects work for cardiac abnormalities that may increase the likelihood of sudden buy buy overnight delivery cardiac death in people with high risk conditions. Although these tragedies.

One of the basic bottom lines of Chapter 2 of Blown to Bits is that the Orwellian nightmare of constant government surveillance through advanced technology hasn’t worked out quite that way. The government is doing it, to be sure. But so are teenagers with their GPS systems and cameras in their cell phones. So are corporations, who can boost their profit margins at tad by keeping track of the digital fingerprints we leave everywhere without thinking about it. And so are jealous husbands and suspicious mothers, who install spyware on the computers that their family members are using.

The spyware business is going mainstream now, supported by the social movement toward flexible work hours, work-at-home arrangements, and the dispersal to domestic settings of jobs like answering 800 numbers. Those social trends are a boon to parents who need to work from home, and will doubtless become even more popular now that moving the employee to the office in a gas-guzzling automobile has become even more expensive, by comparison with moving the bits representing the workload to the worker’s home. Socially useful as work-at-home may be, it has always been tainted with an odor of unprofessionalism. How is anyone to know if the worker is really working?

Last Wednesday, July 30, Sue Schellenbarger of the the Wall Street Journal reported on the trend to install software on those workers’ computers which takes screen snapshots every ten minutes or so, and logs every keystroke and web site visited. Some even take periodic webcam photos and screen outsourced call centers using voice recognition, waiting for hot-button words or just tonal indications that the call-center employee is getting angry. (Sorry, no link; it’s the WSJ. I wonder if Mr. Murdoch will change that.) Mentioned in the story are oDesk.com¬†and Working Solutions. Some expect employees to time their bathroom breaks so the clock is not running while they pee.

If you’ve never seen Chaplin’s¬†Modern Times, you should. It’s hard not to think that there will eventually be some workplace standards for stay-at-home bits workers in the way there are for assembly line workers — developed either through legislation, collective organization, or competitive pressure, as certain businesses succeed by having happier and less stressed employees.

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