Devastating.
The Boss Will See You Now
Zephyr Teachout
We are experiencing a major turning point in the surveillance of workers, driven by wearable tech, artificial intelligence, and Covid.
Several decades ago, when I first moved to New York City, I answered an ad to be a personal assistant to a writer. I imagined myself as amanuensis, translating inspired pronouncements into poems. Instead, I ordered and returned sweaters, scheduled haircuts, and made three-course-meal seating plans for members of the literati whom I never got to meet. My boss, her money-manager husband, and their children lived on Park Avenue, in a penthouse with Georgian drapes and triple-insulated soundproof windows. She collected bespoke services: personal trainers, personal shoppers, a personal poetry trainer, a personal opera coach. I was one of four full-time staff, along with two live-in Irish nannies and a French maid. During our thirty-minute lunchtime, the four of us would hurry into the kitchen to use the small gold-handled faucet that produced instant boiling water to make tea and soup. We slurped and laughed and complained about our boss.
During one of these meals, the chief nanny began a call on the phone in the corner, then quickly slammed down the receiver. Pointing to its golden handle, she mouthed that she thought our boss was listening in. As we huddled over our soup, I said that our boss was always asking me for reports of what we talked about, and the nanny whispered that she was pretty sure she had seen her lurking outside the kitchen door. This was funny for a moment, and then not—a thin skein of anxiety started winding its way across the room.
A few weeks later, the maid was fired. It wasn’t clear that her dismissal was related to anything that had been said. But once paranoia gets its claws in you, it doesn’t let go easily. Our wages and raises were all unpredictable. Two of the staff relied on green cards. These circumstances, which had been the subject of so many conversations, suddenly became the source of insecurity. We gradually, then all at once, stopped having lunch together.
I have lately been thinking of that small discouraging experience as we live through an explosion of corporate investments in workplace surveillance. The year 1995, when I had that job, seems almost embarrassingly quaint, an era of surveillance innocence. There was no Facebook or Google following people everywhere they went, no spooky personalized ads. Back then, Americans spent an average of thirty minutes a month online, and 24/7 intimate surveillance was reserved for targets of FBI investigations.
At the dozen-plus places I had worked by the age of twenty-four, I punched in and out, sped up my dishwashing when the supervisor came through, weighed the beans I picked, bargained to get off early in exchange for cleaning extra bathrooms, and wrote reports for the third-grade teacher I assisted in the classroom. Even the tips I received while waitressing were my business, not the restaurants’. My bosses knew me superficially—my clothes, my general productivity—not what I thought or felt outside the workplace, unless I chose to share it.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/08/18/the-boss-will-see-you-now-zephyr-teachout/
If you can access the article it’s well worth reading. We need legislation to protect people’s privacy and to insure workplace fairness.
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were keys to success in most places I worked. Very few managers really are leaders. I was lucky to work with a select few who were, but I knew my share of of blowhards and bullies, too.
I generally didn't make waves, but I didn't suck up either. I tried to be a team player and get my work done, but work was never the most important thing in my life -- well, aside from that whole "roof over head and feeding the family" thing.
Glad to be retired now, that's for damn sure.
mostly. 
... is almost as interesting as the article she wrote for The New York Review.
(link) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_Teachout
She's a full-time professor at Fordham Law School. She's active in the Democratic Party of NY. As recently as 2018 she ran for State Attorney General, finishing 2nd in the primary to Letitia James. She has published several books and articles on law and political themes. Occasional she has acted in summer stock theater. Hmmm that's quite a list of accomplishments.
I do agree with her thesis here, in that employers have encroached on workers' privacy to the point of almost cringe-worthiness.
I had never heard of her until reading her NYRB article. Now, I’ll keep an eye out for her work. 
