I guess I'm more surprised that these were anonymous at some point. That seems like a pretty normal thing to track when you pay employees hourly. Were they in the building when they claimed to be working?
Like I realize this is charged up by the work from home discussion, but I'd expect any building with a badge to get in the door to be tracking those events, at the very least to detect unauthorized access, but also to detect folks claiming to be working when they're not even there. Basic fraud prevention stuff really.
> to detect folks claiming to be working when they're not even there
I think it's outrageous to look at it this way. Tracking for security, safety, or insurance purposes—sure. Maybe even to make it easier to post your hours.
Tracking to detect who is working and how many bathroom breaks they take—that's not the way to go. We're humans right? Surely there are ways to detect when someone doesn't fulfil a task they were supposed to.
Yeah I agree it is quite invasive, and humans aren't machines. I have a coworker going through colon cancer and has to use a colostomy bag which takes time to deal with.
...Amazon would just fire him for wasting time in the bathroom. Still a great worker, just needs more time than the average. What a great future we are working towards.
Okay, but that is after-the-fact. He has to stress about it now and then file a lawsuit while unemployed and dealing with cancer. I mean, even if he wins... that supposes that he lives long enough to win the suit. So "should" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment.
I understand the stress, having been through it myself. I think that employees should have greater rights than they currently do, but that will take another generation of voters that didn't grow up with the veneration of business imbued by Ronald Reagan etc.
In my particular case, I've made extensive use of the ADA to make sure that I don't have to deal with any BS about bathroom breaks etc. Of course I work in IT so I'm pretty privileged compared to a guy slaving away in an Amazon warehouse.
All true, and very well said. Having a disability, temporary or otherwise, is in itself a burden most people don't have to carry. Having to worry that it could get you fired feels awful, and it's something you think about most of the time.
If you're someone who needs the protections of the ADA, you should make sure your HR team knows what accommodations you need.
I have a disability that isn't obvious, and have to routinely make sure that my leaders are aware of the accommodations I need. I've had HR actively take action on my behalf when certain middle managers didn't know, or care, to support those accommodations. In one incident, they fired a manager over their lack of support.
While I hate that I need to do it, it tends to be worth it to make sure your company knows what you need.
I'd also like to think that, should I ever get fired because HR didn't manage to intervene in a similar situation as described, the dispute would be more likely to go my way. It at least removes the ability for the company to say "we didn't know about the disability."
Can we stop acting like it isn't trivial to get around these laws if you're not stupid about it? The US has at-will employment, which means that you just come up with another excuse to fire someone without being stupid enough to explicitly state it's related to their disability.
I'm very aware of how companies can try to discriminate against employees who are disabled. If Amazon tries to fire this guy for not meeting his "quota," then they also need to demonstrate that they've made reasonable accommodations. They also need to carefully document his performance issues. Juries are very amenable to a plaintiff suing for unfair dismissal.
Yes, this requires having enough money to hire a good lawyer, or finding one either working pro bono or willing to work on a contingency basis. Or finding an agency like the EEOC etc which will help with this.
The alternative is to just say "too bad" and let companies get away with this shit.
No, that's not the only alternative. Where did you come by this defeatist perspective? Another alternative is union representation to confront the firing before it happens.
Sure, unions are another solution, but let's be clear:
A union only works if you were part of the union before you were fired unjustly.
Without that, "too bad" is indeed often the best you can do.
I was once in the hospital with acute pancreatitis. It was unplanned, and would have killed me had I not made it to the ER. The company I was working for at the time "let me go" because I'd gone two days without showing up to work. Given that during those two days I was unconscious and nearly dead, that would have been impossible to do.
When I spoke to a lawyer, they were very clear that the company had broken the law (FMLA protects people in situations like mine), but that fighting it would cost me a lot of money, and that there was no guarantee I'd win. I fought them anyways. I spent months fighting them, and spent thousands of dollars. The company ended up receiving a fine for less that what I paid in lawyer fees, and that's it. No payout for me, no resolution. The state felt the case was at least strong enough to justify the fine, but not strong enough to justify anything else.
So, yeah, sometimes "too bad" is about all we get.
I agree with unionization, but I was discussing the current status quo for the majority of workers in the US. Hopefully unions will both grow in number and be strengthened.
Oh, I see. I misunderstood. Perhaps the fault lies with my ideological bent, or with the English language.
When you said "The alternative is to just say 'too bad' and let companies get away with this shit" there were no pronouns or whatever indicating the subject of the verbs "say" and "let". I assumed the subject of the sentence was a broad "we, as a society, over the next several decades", whereas I'm now realizing you meant "one, as an individual caught in this particularly tragic moment."
> Tracking to detect who is working and how many bathroom breaks they take—that's not the way to go.
Given the way Amazon treats their warehouse workers, I'm more surprised folks don't already assume they Big Brother their office workers in a similar way.
One of those classes is more equal than the other, though I assure you that when Bezos stares down at them all from space, he does not see them any differently.
I didn't get the impression these were hourly employees, or that this was restricted to hourly employees.
It seems to be less about "How many hours were you in the building?" than "Which days did you come to the building?" which tracks compliance with an RTO mandate that even affects salaried employees.
Salaried employees are typically expected to work 5 days a week, hours not tracked. But tracking attendance and the designated work venue seems very fair to me.
It's normal for a badge-checking system, but it's still an erosion of white-collar norms (autonomy being the key one) to be so proscriptive about how knowledge workers complete their work.
Side note, but when I worked somewhere with badged entrances, one person would badge the whole group. So this data wouldn't mean employees aren't there if there is no swipe.
You aren't supposed to do that anyway. It seems far fetched, but someone might have been terminated without you knowing and is trying to sneak back in. At a larger enough company, this is bound to occur
We're supposed to do individual scans. If I walk through a door that someone is holding for me I can my badge and make a quip about Big Brother. A lot of people don't scan in these situations and I think that's a mistake. Our employer is absolutely tracking badge scans against employees who are supposed to be RTO.
I've been in the tech industry since 1995, and I've never worked somewhere that didn't require individual security badges to gain access to the building. Both schemes exist in abundance.
Some of the FANG certainly do, using one at a time admission enforcement devices in some (but not necessarily all) of their core offices. Amazon, Meta for sure.
30 years ago, a friend of mine worked at a Wall Street bank in NYC. They had a policy that you could take a car service (paid by the company) home if you worked in the office until 9PM. He used to badge out at around 6PM, go to dinner/drinks at a nearby restaurant, then badge back in a 9PM and order a car. :-) This behavior was noticed by the badge police and we was soon looking for a new job. :-)
I didn’t think anyone wanted to open that Pandora’s box with respect to hourly workers lest people start suing for unpaid work using badge in time as evidence. As long as they don’t track it too closely they have a lot more plausible deniability for wage theft. Once they start tracking it, the lawyers can start manipulating juries.
As it's often said, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If you're going to watch closely people on the hours done, also make sure to pay them properly for any excess hours. Wage theft is the worst kind of theft.
This data is not typically provided to line managers, and is usually only used in extreme cases by HR. The news is your boss is now basic time clocking salaried employees.
That’s not new either, but it is pretty new for professionals in software. It’s also historically not how salaried employment worked. Salaried employment meant you’re paid a salary and you get your job done or lose your job. No one is tracking your time in any way, and you are afforded a certain amount of trust. Your performance is based on your output as judged by your managers. Paid time off accounting scuttled this for salaried people, but this is a next level of bean counting for salaried professionals.
The badging data absolutely existed before now - but who had access to it, who was looking at it, and what was the criteria used to determine days in office?
Answers to those questions have changed over the last 6 months.
I know that my employer (big company everyone here knows) is tracking badge scans as part of RTO compliance. I've had conversations with my manager about it because I'm supposed to be in 3 days per week but typically only make it 2 due to a physical therapy appointment. It's no problem, since I've worked it out with my manager, but I do wonder if I'll get swooped up in some dragnet and be forced to explain myself, or worse.
> That seems like a pretty normal thing to track when you pay employees hourly.
We need eye trackers and brain implants to make sure the workers aren't looking at something else or thinking about non work related tasks too. I don't want to pay these parasites a single cent for idle time /s
Like I realize this is charged up by the work from home discussion, but I'd expect any building with a badge to get in the door to be tracking those events, at the very least to detect unauthorized access, but also to detect folks claiming to be working when they're not even there. Basic fraud prevention stuff really.