Computers spy on users, says writer

Press, 13 September 1988, Page 30

Computers spy on users, says writer

NZPA-ReuterNew York Computers are turning white-collar offices into old-fashioned sweatshops with a sinister modern twist: managers can now easily adapt technology to spy on their workers. So argues the writerplaywright, Barbara Garson, in a new book that says computers are dehumanising the workplace aad transforming stockbrokers, military officers, social workers and other professionals into clerks.

“The same principles that transformed craftsmen into factory hands are now being applied to make whitecollar workers cheaper to train, easier to replace, less skilled, less expensive and less special,” Garson writes.

White-collar workers, she argues, are the latest victims of a trend toward workplace electronic surveillance that has already hit clerks, switchboard operators, secretaries, bank tellers and ' service workers.

The goal of modern management, she said in a recent interview, is to centralise control by using computer programmes to dictate exactly how a worker does his or her job. Her new book, “The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers Are

Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past,” follows her popular 1970 s “All the Livelong Day,” about the tedium of factory assembly lines. Management’s impulse, Garson said, has always been to control. “What’s new is that electronic monitoring is cheap, and it’s easy to compile and correlate data on a given worker. In the old days or in blue-collar jobs, you’d almost have to have one supervisor for each worker to monitor so carefully a worker’s performance.”

Now computers can count coffee breaks, telephone calls and even keystrokes, thus making some workers accountable for every second of the working day and slaves to numerical ratings. “With computers counting only numerical things, there’s a shift toward thinking that that’s what counts,” Garson said. In some professions, computers have taken over much of the job. Many financial planners, for instance, depend on computer programs to advise their clients. They simply hand out questionnaires and feed the responses into a computer, which churns out a financial

plan. Garson cites a 1985 United States Department of Labour study stating that two-thirds of all American workers who use video terminals — an estimated 7 million, people — are under second-by-second electronic surveillance by their managers.

A computer not only tells fast-food restaurant employees when to take the chips out of the frying fat, but also influences military decisions. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, one of the dozens of people Garson interviewed in her research, explained how computerised inventory control brought to light the United States bombing of Cambodia in 1969, which had been kept secret from Congress.

Garson concluded that automation could sometimes pay off in terms of efficiency and productivity, but that it was often degrading and intrusive.

“If a job can really be done by a machine, like bank teller machines, then let it really be done by a machine,” she said. “It’s just when you try to turn the person into a machine that I object.”