grylliade.org Free minds. Free markets. Free beer.

That's the new standard? Then to hell with that. If I'm hired to do X job for Y price, all that should matter is whether or not I deliver the work I promised by the time I said I would.

Ugh. They need a new name for that kind of job. Free lance doesn't suit the situation anymore. In Home Incarceration - Lance?

I did a lot of freelance programmer work for Odesk.com a while back. My particular employers didn't require me to set up my camera but the way it was set up if you were 'on duty' then it would auto-send a screen shot but you could flip it to 'not logged in' or whatever so it wouldn't send screen shots if you needed to do something else. However, if you did that those minutes wouldn't count as billable minutes.

Granted in the case of those jobs they were specifically hourly jobs, so time tracking was very important.

EDIT: Still obnoxious though. Programming work isn't always a sit down and slog through kind of thing. I mean a lot of time is spent on planning, design, and that sort of thing, heck in some cases more can be spent on that sort of thing. Not necessarily easily represented by a screen shot.

Any sort of brain work requires periods of looking inactive. That's just how it goes.
When I got stuck on an article (usually the opening), I would either go out for a cigarette or walk around the block until I figured it out. Despite appearances, I was working.

I sure as hell said "no," but more and more people are desperate enough to say "yes." And the only reason I was able to say no is because I am fortunate enough to have a boyfriend willing to carry me for awhile.

{libertarian heresy} This is exactly the sort of reason I don't buy the hardcore libertarian stance that no worker protection laws whatsoever are necessary; government isn't the only force with the power to oppress people.{/libertarian heresy}

The next time my kidney-stone problem acts up, I might consider taking a job with the "schedule a bathroom break in advance" people so I can sue the tyrannical fuckers under ADA.

Maybe. Or maybe this vile spy software will become more and more popular among employers, leaving less and less opportunities for workers to make money AND maintain the fiction that they possess basic human dignity. Even I submitted to a goddamned piss test to take my last job. But a webcam and six-times-an-hour screenshots, not to mention "take time off an hour in advance if you need to visit the bathroom, and a two-minute bathroom break means an entire half-hour off the clock": FUCK YOU. I'll work as a goddamned diner waitress first.

The huge gains in worker productivity these past few years sure as hell haven't translated into huge gains in worker salaries. Why should we expect employer-generated savings benefits to trickle down to the workers, either? With rare exceptions, the number of people willing and able to do a particular job will ALWAYS be greater than the number of jobs available. So for every one person who says "fuck you, I quit," there will be plenty more eager to take that job. For a lower salary, even.

The company required you to install this software before they hired you, right? You should send them a sternly-worded letter explaining that requiring you to install spyware under cover of a job applicant screening procedure is highly, highly illegal.

Then ask for a nice fat settlement. :)

Still not the same thing as being on camera. Besides, in an office environment you can check on your superiors just as easily.

Were you expected to schedule your bathroom visits an hour in advance? I'm guessing not.

How far in advance did you have to ask permission? And did each visit result in a half-hour pay cut?

I guess instead of threatening legal action, you could just have Jeff walk around naked in the background all the time.

EDIT: Actually, for maximum value, you should hire a fat ugly guy to do that. Just don't turn around.

But it was fun in being a temp job with no benefits IN A LABOR UNION FOR THE DIRECTOR OF BENEFITS. The irony was utterly lost on them.

Yup - but unlike all those things you mention, this doesn't have even a nebulous link to security or safety with which to put people in sheep mode. It's just a patently dickish thing for an employer to do, which is why I think it has a good chance of being kicked back against.

By that logic, we'd all be getting paid minimum wage.

It all depends on how much people mind this versus their perceived alternatives. But I don't claim to know how that will pan out.

I never said it did. I'm simply pointing out that concepts like privacy and dignity are evermore becoming luxuries only the rich and powerful can afford. And I still think it likely such monitoring software will become more common, not less, as time goes on.

There's already a solution in place, which doesn't even require technology: you get paid for the work you do. If I hire you to write a 500-word article by Monday, I expect a 500-word article by Monday. I don't need webcam screenshots to see whether or not you're picking your nose while you write it. I don't need to monitor every single keystroke you make to determine how many times you rewrote a sentence. I don't need to know if you wrote the article in a single productive burst of energy, or worked on it a little at a time between breaks. All that matters -- all that should matter -- is: did you write the fucking article I asked for, and get it to me by the agreed-upon deadline?

Check out this actual help-wanted ad (bold print mine):

If you're expected to turn in your work at the end of each day, why the need for monitoring software and a webcam? Isn't the fact that you turn in your work at the end of each day sufficient proof that you did the agreed-upon job in the agreed-upon time period?

So far oDesk mostly uses non-American contractors; i.e., people who don't expect silly fringe benefits like "privacy" or "dignity." It will become commonplace here soon enough.

If this is true, then it would appear that people respond to the watchful eye of authority and not only to the incentive of getting paid or keeping the job. And if you're an employer and you hire ten people and trust them to do the work cause after all they'll get fired if they don't do it, and all ten screw up, you might consider finding a way to monitor them on the grounds (per what Jason says, not altogether unreasonable) that they'll be motivated by the monitoring in ways that the threat of not getting paid won't motivate them. And if you're tired of hiring and firing folks, trying to find someone who will let themselves be monitored may seem reasonable and worth it. After all, Jennifer, I think most managers know that just firing people who don't do their job adequately is not necessarily the best way to get the most out of them. Now, as has been said before, that doesn't mean this will prove to be the optimal answer to the (perceived) problem, either, but if what Jason says is true, then there clearly is a call for doing more than taking the approach you, Jennifer, seem to think is so obviously the one called for.

I can see the point of monitoring for long-term, full-time employment, where sustained productivity matters and some tasks are not as easily measured as others, or falling behind is harder to notice right away.

I don't see the point of monitoring for freelance work. Freelancers are, by definition, people doing short-term jobs, and are often juggling multiple jobs. Demanding that they be on the clock for a set time rather than just doing a set task seems contrary to the whole point.

I said above that I'm suspicious of assertions that a bad practice will always be weeded out, but I wonder if this will be weeded out in certain sectors and sustained in others. Some jobs naturally lend themselves to freelancing, while some "work at home" models are probably ill-advised. This might be the sort of thing that sustains itself for those types of at-home work that weren't traditionally freelance, but I suspect it will eventually die out for freelance jobs.

Or consider this mini-article from last week's Onion:

Uh, yeah. No shit. And yet "being an asshole boss" is still super-commonplace. There's a reason bitter jokes like "Beatings will continue until morale improves" are part of the zeitgeist. It's not just an American affliction; it's human nature. I remember a Hit and Run post from some time back: Japan's government is worried because so few women are choosing to marry and become mommies. The reason for this is that societal expectations for a wife-n-mother are utterly miserable, so of COURSE women with any other option will avoid it. But the government's suggestion for solving the problem was NOT "let's address the reasons WHY women don't want to get married or have babies"; it was "let's nag women and call them selfish and see if THAT will change their minds."

And if office morale is low, let's ramp up the beating schedule and see if THAT makes things better. If people keep quitting because they hate their jobs, let's make the jobs even worse.

Jennifer, you're right. People are really fucked up and this is a horrible world we live in.

While I'm not in love with regulatory solutions, I agree with Jennifer and No. 6's main point, that there are some jobs with permanent, chronic oversupply of labor, leading to horribly unfair working conditions for the 99.99% who don't make it to the big time. The ones who do make it are happy with the situation (see: Metallica) and don't want to rock the boat.

Though asshole bosses are not limited to just those professions. The key is to luck into an industry that is desperate for your talent and experience so the balance goes the other way. But...that is largely luck.

And I don't know if you can ever legislate away assholes, because every behavior you ban will cause them to think up new behaivors.

Because we can all find instances in which controlling our fellow human being, through the use of the law whatever's available, including oDesk software, is very tempting appealing.

FIXED.

Would a hypothetical "Freelance Bathroom Freedom Act of 2008" pass any libertarian purity tests? Nope.

Could it reasonably lead to absurd overreach? Yep.

Is "workers must schedule bathroom breaks a couple hours in advance and lose a half-hour's pay for each one" preferable to me? Nope.

EDIT: HTML goofs.

I'm not quite as down in the dumps about things as the rest of you. I don't have a dissertation on the subject, but I'll point out a few things.

1. Sturgeon's Law. Most people just aren't very good at what they do. This includes managers and workers both.
2. The market pays for value added. (In the long run, at least. Obviously, there are distortions in the short run.)

Why do jobs like "stand here and ring up purchases" tend to pay crap and treat their workers like crap? Because ANYONE WITH TWO FUNCTIONING BRAIN CELLS CAN DO THEM. And the value added to the organization by this labor is pretty small. So yes, there is a vast supply of fungible labor. I feel sorry for people who work minimum wage jobs and have to ask permission to leave their stations, but you know what? They get paid little because their labor is WORTH LITTLE.

Why does my job pay well and provide me with a fair amount of freedom? Because there are damn few people who can administer Unix servers at the level do, and we add a lot of value to the organization.

Also, that guy who was willing to have all his programmers walk out on him? An idiot. I see two possibilities: either his programmers really were that easily replaceable, in which case they were turning out code like McDonald's turns out hamburgers, or the programmers really did have valuable knowledge stored in their heads...which is not replaced by grabbing another warm body off the street. Either way, I suspect the company is churning out crap. According to oDesk's own figures (http://www.odesk.com/community/oconomy/rate_statistics) they're paying about $14/hour on average, with a sizeable population at $5/hr and $10/hr. Maybe that gets you a good programmer in Russia or China; here in NYC, you'd probably make better money working at a parking garage.

So what's the lesson here? Mainly, do the hardest job that you can do. Don't bother competing with every room-temperature-IQ with no skills, and don't compete with people in Third World economies. Jennifer, the reason you're getting treated like this is because you're trying to compete in the wrong section of the economy. Don't compete with half-literate people in poor countries if that's what buyers want. What are your advantages, Jennifer? You're a fluent, skilled, and creative native speaker of English, you're quite presentable in-person, and you're here in the US. So look for jobs that require that and not just some warm body in front of a computer somewhere. I know it's harder to find (just as good cuisine is harder to find than fast food), but I think the rewards will be proportionately greater.

OK, I guess I did have a dissertation.

No, you're missing two subtle distinctions: one, saying "I need to visit the bathroom at this moment, please" is different from "I would like to schedule a bathroom break two hours from now, and I can only take this as a full half-hour unpaid break."

Two, the issue isn't even "Needing to ask before leaving your station," but how reasonable or necessary it is.

People at Jeff's job have to do that, and they're well-paid, well-skilled labor. The bathroom restrictions are because they work in TV/cable broadcasting, the sort of job where super-complicated machines MUST be manned every single second.

So no, the guy who's managing a live feed of a sports telecast can't just stroll off and leave his station unmanned. Each shift there's at least one "floater" whose job is to cover for whoever needs covering. If you need to go to the bathroom and the floater's already taken, you may have to wait five or ten minutes before he can replace you at your station. Even then, nobody's expected to schedule bathroom breaks several hours beforehand. And they don't dock your pay.

That's very different from fussing over the bathroom activities of someone working at home in the type of job whose outcome has nothing to do with when they go to the bathroom.

I can't think of a better solution than letting the market sort it out, which is to say, good freelance writers should refuse to work under these conditions if that is how the cost benefit analysis plays out for them.

If there's an oversupply of labor, well, I don't know what to tell you. I don't think farmers should be artificially kept in business in terms they'd prefer either.

Jennifer: I get you; I understand the difference. Clearly, there are some positions where having to schedule bathroom breaks is a necessary part of the job (broadcast engineers, security guards, etc.) and some where it's just the boss being a controlling jerk. There's a need for the first and never a need for the second. I don't know quite how to explain why it happens as often as it does, other than that there's a certain cultural attitude about it, like sweatshop workers etc. "deserve" to be treated that way. To use Fyodor's story about his friend who's going to pay the janitors as well as everyone else, a sole proprietorship can do that (although most don't, I'm guessing), but I think once a company becomes public, it tends to get ruled by a kind of mass consciousness, and the mass consciousness doesn't see the point of paying janitors more than necessary, or giving them benefits, etc...

Fyodor: Have you ever read "Some of your friends are already this fucked"? Based on what I've read, the music industry can really treat people like dirt - but, as you point out, everybody in it is in it by choice. That doesn't excuse treating people badly, but again, it's kind of an example of we as a culture seem to reach some decisions without ever openly discussing them. And because just about every single musician could go do something else, the whole "exploited" claim does sound funny. I mean, Appalachian coal miners they're not.

"I been workin' the power chord mines just like my daddy and his daddy before him, same as every family 'round here. It's a hard life, but it's what we got. Last week we were jamming and we hit a G-sharp minor seventh, and my buddy didn't make it out in time. I had to tell his wife and kids, and it must've been the fourth or fifth funeral I've been to in the last couple of years. But they didn't close the mine for but half a day, and the next day we were back there with our Stratocasters again."

Whether the market "works" depends on what criteria one lays out for its "working." It doesn't always give each and every one of us everything we want it to. But it's certainly true that we're competing, to one degree or another, with everyone on the globe. Which is both good and bad for us, though I'd say mostly good.

Jennifer, I think we can officially label you a pessimist. Though I'm sure you feel you're just being realist (don't we all?). I hope and expect third world peoples' living standards to go up over the long haul, and I hope and expect ours to as well (our current malaise notwithstanding). If we "drop" down, I would expect that to be only in relative terms, meaning perhaps the rest of the world is improving faster. As for employee autonomy, that could go in any direction overall, and I think it most likely will go in varying directions at once for varying sectors.

But who knows, anything is possible.

JD,

No I haven't read a book of that title. I tried googling and got some interesting stuff, but no book! LOL on the musician as coal miner, though I should make clear that I'm not trying to paint musicians as necessarily seeing themselves in such a dire light (not to say it doesn't happen, either!)!

I'm not talking about material living standards; I'm talking about expectations of individual freedom vs. the level of power you expect others to have over you.

The same situation exists in saturated labor pools across the board. The business model is changing and maybe into something a lot of people don't like. Hence, #6 is a paramedic. You may come to the place where freelance writing isn't going to be the answer.

To be honest, I think most jobs are that way. I didn't dream of being a 401k recordkeeping guy, but there you are. I agree that being married to a particular job in this dynamic economy is a recipe for sadness over the long run. For me, that speaks more to the mental state of the job hunter than to any broad problem with the economy.

Not to be utterly unsympathetic, but I'm just not sympathetic enough to the inconvenience posed by a single program used by an unknown number of companies to shrug at banning or regulating it. If we were talking about something at most places that accepted freelance material, that might be debatable. Declaring the need for government intervention to save freelance writers upon encountering a company using it seems excessive even by Blue standards (OK, by the standards of calmer Blues).

Yes, it might be the wave of the future; I don't think so, though. It might carve out a niche on the low/fly-by-night end of the market, like SEO companies. I really wouldn't be surprised to see the publisher fold in 5 years, though. Someone has to monitor those web cams, and especially on the marginal end of the market, companies will get tired of paying a company to do that or having someone on the payroll do it.

Oh, I'm not calling for any regulation now (though I can see how you might think so in light of earlier posts). If it's just one crappy company, then the market probably will sort it out. My concern is that this is likely to become more and more commonplace. And not just for freelancers, either: in light of high gas prices, more and more companies are letting workers (employees, not freelance) work at home one or two days a week. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of current office jobs become entirely work-at-home deals, since maintaining an office is a huge expense.

We're already seeing greater intrusion into employee's off-the-clock time; e.g., "Smoking is legal but if you or anyone in your family does it you're fired." So far The Market seems to be shifting toward less and less freedom for employees.

Add to that the intrusive potential of modern technology, and I think we're heading toward a bleak dystopian future.

Actually, I would not be at all surprised if nobody was monitoring them.

It's very possible that the images only get looked at if management has some reason to think the employee is malingering.

Monitoring by camera and automatic screenshots every ten minutes?
Requiring you to download and install such software onto your own computer in order to work?

In the parlance of the kids of about four years ago:
That shit is fuckin' wack as fuck yo.

Quite frankly, I would imagine that a rather cursory reading of the law with regard to what constitutes an employee vs. what constitutes a contractor would show that these measures are probably in violation of the law.

*MG sinks into fantasyland*

It would be totally sweet if you were to research whether such egregiously stupid management oversight of a contractor is, in fact, a violation of labor law. If it is, you should take the job. Work at it for awhile, and then either sue the everliving shit out of them, or blackmail them by threatening to call the authorities and blow the whistle on their practices.

Then you could write a book about it.

*MG comes back out of fantasyland*

FWIW, one of the main reasons I left my previous job (other than the somewhat shitty pay, an owner who had the business sense of a canned ham, and slim chances of advancement) was that the owner continuously made ridiculous demands on the design department to document how many ads were designed in a given period of time with no thought given to the quality of the work, nor the challenges faced when having to design something from scratch or with terribly sub-standard artwork.

Since I'm still getting daily "Job Notifications" from the company I went to their "Delete account" page and, in the "comment" box, wrote: "I signed on with Odesk before I knew of the degrading conditions required for workers. Please delete all mention of me from your software, programs or whatever." And then I got an automated response telling me a member of the Support Team will get back to me within one business day. I'm sure they'll know better than to bother.