Tag: Employment

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Privacy, Dignity, and Autonomy in the Workplace

Reporting by Sophie Charara unpacks the potentials of contemporary workplace monitoring technologies. Of course, concerns about employee privacy and the overzealous surveillance of employees are not new. What is changing are the ways that contemporary technologies can be used, sometimes for potentially positive uses (e.g., making it easier to determine if meeting rooms are actually available for booking or ensuring that highly-trafficked areas of the office receive special cleaning) and sometimes for concerning uses (e.g., monitoring where employees gather in the workplace, tracking them in near-real time through the work environment, or monitoring communications patterns).

Ultimately, Charara’s work can help inform ongoing discussions about what safeguards and protections should be considered in the workplace, so that employees’ privacy is appropriately protected. It can, also, showcase practices that we may want to bar before ever coming into mainstream practice to protect the privacy, dignity, and autonomy of people in the workplace.

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Quotations

It’s Not An Age Divide, It’s A Deregulation Divide

All those people who had a certain amount of labour experience prior to or into the early 1990s and then carried on, they weren’t necessarily the ones who have seen that sort of precarity and job loss. Their experience carried them through.

People entering the workforce since then have had to contend with the continual erosion of labour standards, labour law, and collective bargaining, as well as all these different kinds of carveouts, especially around self-employment.  

It creates what looks like an age divide, but it’s not really. It’s a deregulation divide.

John Peters, from “‘The rich and everybody else’: Financial inequality in Canada keeps growing”
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Doing A Policy-Oriented PhD

Steve Saideman has a good, short, thought on why doing a PhD is rarely a good idea for Canadians who want to get into policy work. Specifically, he writes:

In Canada, alas, there is not that much of a market for policy-oriented PhDs. We don’t have much in the way of think tanks, there are only a few govt jobs that either require PhDs or where the PhD gives one an advantage over an MA, and, the govt does not pay someone more if they have a PhD.

I concur that there are few places, including think tanks or civil society organizations, where you’re likely to find a job if you have a policy-related PhD. Moreover, when you do find one it can be challenging, if not impossible, to find promotion opportunities because the organizations tend to be so small.

That said, I do in fact think that doing a policy-related PhD can sometimes be helpful if you stay pretty applied in your outputs while pursuing your degree. In my case, I spent a lot of time during my PhD on many of the same topics that I still focus on, today, and can command a premium in consulting rates and seniority for other positions because I’ve been doing applied policy work for about 15 years now, inclusive of my time in my PhD. I, also, developed a lot of skills in my PhD—and in particular the ability to ask and assess good questions, know how questions or policy issues had been previously answered and to what effect, and a reflexive or historical thinking capacity I lacked previously—that are all helpful soft skills in actually doing policy work. Moreover, being able to study policy and politics, and basically act as an independent agent for the time of my PhD, meant I had a much better sense of what I thought about issues, why, and how to see them put into practice than I would have gained with just a master’s degree.

Does that mean I’d recommend doing a PhD? Well…no. There are huge opportunity costs you incur in doing them and, also, you can narrow you job market searches by appearing both over-educated and under-qualified. The benefits of holding a PhD tend to become more apparent after a few years in a job as opposed to being helpful in netting that first one out of school.

I don’t regret doing a PhD but, if someone is particularly committed to doing one, I think that they should hurl themselves into it with absolute abandon and treat it as a super-intensive 40-65 hour/week job, and be damn sure that you have a lot of non-academic outputs to prove to a future employer that you understand the world and not just academic journals. It’s hard work, which is sometimes rewarding, and there are arguably different (and less unpleasant) ways of getting to a relatively similar end point. But if someone is so motivated by a hard question that they’d be doing the research and thinking about it, regardless of whether they were in a PhD program? Then they might as well go and get the piece of paper while figuring out the answer.

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Ontario’s Path Towards Legitimizing Employee Surveillance

Earlier this week, the Ontario government declared that it would be introducing a series of labour reforms. As part of these reforms, employers will be required to inform their employees of how they are being electronically monitored. These requirements will be applied to all employers with 25 or more employees.

Employers already undertake workplace surveillance, though it has become more common and extensive as a result of the pandemic. Where surveillance is undertaken, however, businesses must seek out specialized counsel or services to craft appropriate labour policies or contracting language. This imposes costs and, also, means that different firms may provide slightly different information. The effect is that employers may be more cautious in what surveillance they adopt and be required to expend funds to obtain semi-boutique legal opinions.

While introducing legislation would seem to extend privacy protections for employees, as understood at the moment the reforms will only require a notification to employees of the relevant surveillance. It will not bar the surveillance itself. Further, with a law on the books it will likely be easier for Ontario consulting firms to provide pretty rote advice based on the legislative language. The result, I expect, will be to drive down the transaction costs in developing workplace surveillance policies at the same time that workplace surveillance technologies become more affordable and extensively deployed.

While I suspect that many will herald this law reform as positive for employees, on the basis that at least now they will know how they are being monitored, I am far less optimistic. The specificity of notice will matter, a lot, and unless great care is taken in drafting the legislation employers will obtain a significant degree of latitude in the actual kinds of intrusive surveillance that can be used. Moreover, unless required in legislative language, we can expect employers to conceal the specific modes of surveillance on grounds of needing to protect the methods for operational business reasons. This latter element is of particular concern given that major companies, including office productivity companies like Microsoft, are baking extensive workplace surveillance functionality into their core offerings. Ontario’s reforms are not, in fact, good for employees but are almost certain to be a major boon for their employers.

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Pandemic Burnout in Academia

Virginia Gewin, writing for Nature:

Even before the pandemic, many researchers in academia were struggling with poor mental health. Desiree Dickerson, an academic mental-health consultant in Valencia, Spain, says that burnout is a problem inherent in the academic system: because of how narrowly it defines excellence, and how it categorizes and rewards success. “We need to reward and value the right things,” she says.

…

Yet evidence of empathetic leadership at the institutional level is in short supply, says Richard Watermeyer, a higher-education researcher at the University of Bristol, UK, who has been conducting surveys to monitor impacts of the pandemic on academia. Performative advice from employers to look after oneself or to leave one day a week free of meetings to catch up on work is pretty superficial, he says. Such counsel does not reduce work allocation, he points out.

Academia has a rampant problem in how it is professionally configured. To get even a short term contract, now, requires a CV that would have been worthy of tenure twenty or thirty years ago. Which means that, when someone is hired as an assistant professor (with a 3-6 year probation period) they are already usually more qualified than their peers of the past and have to be prolific in the work that they contribute to and output, and do so with minimal or no complaints so as to avoid any problems in their transition from assistant to associate professor (i.e., full-time and sometimes protected employee).

Once someone has gone through the gauntlet, they come to expect that others should go through it as well: if the current generation can cut it, then surely the next generation of hires should be able to as well if they’re as ‘good’ as the current generation. Which means that those who were forced into an unsustainable work environment that routinely eats into personal time, vacation time (i.e., time when you use vacation days to catch up on other work that otherwise is hard to get done), child rearing time, and so forth, expect that those following them do the same.

Add into this the fact that most academic units are semi-self governing, and those in governorship positions (e.g., department chairs, deans) tend to lack any actual qualifications in managing a largely autonomous workforce and cannot rebalance work loads in a systemically positive way so as to create more sustainable working environments. As a result of a lack of formal management skills, these same folks tend to be unable to identify the issues that might come up in a workforce/network of colleagues, and they are also not resourced to know how to actually treat the given problem. And all of this presumes they are motivated to find and resolve problems in the first place. This very premise is often found faulty, given that those who are governing are routinely most concerned with the smooth running of their units and, of course, may keep in mind any junior colleagues who happen to cause ‘problems’ by expecting assistance or consideration given the systemic overwork that is the normal work-life imbalance.

What’s required is a full-scale revolt in the very structure of university departments if work-life balance is to be truly valued, and if academics are to be able to satisfy their teaching, service, and research requirements in the designated number of working hours. While the job is often perceived as very generous–and it is, in a whole lot of ways!–because you (ideally) have parts of it that you love, expecting people to regularly have 50-75 hour work weeks, little real downtime, little time with family and friends, and being placed on a constant treadmill of outputs is a recipe for creating jaded, cynical, and burned out professionals. Sadly, that’s how an awful lot of contemporary departments are configured.

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On Interning at Slack – Code Like A Girl

From On Interning at Slack – Code Like A Girl:

I’ve had a rough year so far. After coming back to college, I got hit by a car and my grandfather passed away within two weeks of each other. I was diagnosed with a mental disorder. My grades slipped from As to Ds. I had to discontinue my classes in April, and missed two months of classes. I developed PTSD around cars and loud noises, and mourned my grandfather. I partied to not feel the pain and the fear of going outside. In May, I admitted myself to a psychiatric hospital so I could be sure that I wouldn’t hurt myself.

This probably doesn’t seem like it’s relevant. But it is. It felt like everything that could have gone wrong did. Slack was at every point in the process to support me.

I was given permission to call in black. I was allowed to work from home on the days I was too afraid to go outside. I was given a week to help transition my puppy to my house before he was to begin his service dog training. My mentor and manager, a woman and a woman of color, checked in with me at least once a week to make sure I was ok and asked about the ways they could best support me. I called in sick often on the days where every noise made me fear my life. I drew support from the greater Slack community when I needed help.

I made friends with other interns, and didn’t treat me differently after talking about my disabilities. I bonded over boba and makeup with the other engineers and writers at Slack. I spammed the #dogs channel with pictures of my dogs, and created #acai-bowls for those trendy connoisseurs. I was no longer a brown female queer intern with the service dog, but just another engineer. I gave a presentation to the Slack community about ableism and why it was important. And people listened.

This is what a company that genuinely commits to inclusivity and supporting employees looks like.

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Good cooks are quitting the kitchen, and that’s bad news for your favourite restaurant

Good cooks are quitting the kitchen, and that’s bad news for your favourite restaurant:

For those making $14 an hour, we’re not even talking about fresh-out-of-school, no-experience, paying-their-dues cooks, who often swing $125 for a 12-hour shift that works out to less than Ontario’s legal minimum wage of $11.25 per hour. No, we’re talking about people who’ve spent years honing their skills, demonstrating their loyalty and work ethic in an industry where “passion” is used as a marker of dedication, and the perceived lack of it as a tool for dismissing any cook who complains about conditions or compensation. One chef I spoke with referred to this as a “crime of passion.”

I have a family member in the food industry, and it staggers me whenever I learn how much he takes home in a year after working 60 hour weeks, 51 weeks a year.

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A New Work Reality?

A New Work Reality?:

Putting a face to the reality of Ontario’s labour market.

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Working Anything but 9 to 5

Working Anything but 9 to 5:

SAN DIEGO — In a typical last-minute scramble, Jannette Navarro, a 22-year-old Starbucks barista and single mother, scraped together a plan for surviving the month of July without setting off family or financial disaster.

In contrast to the joyless work she had done at a Dollar Tree store and a KFC franchise, the $9-an-hour Starbucks job gave Ms. Navarro, the daughter of a drug addict and an absentee father, the hope of forward motion. She had been hired because she showed up so many times, cheerful and persistent, asking for work, and she had a way of flicking away setbacks — such as a missed bus on her three-hour commute — with the phrase, “I’m over it.”

…

But Ms. Navarro’s fluctuating hours, combined with her limited resources, had also turned their lives into a chronic crisis over the clock. She rarely learned her schedule more than three days before the start of a workweek, plunging her into urgent logistical puzzles over who would watch the boy. Months after starting the job she moved out of her aunt’s home, in part because of mounting friction over the erratic schedule, which the aunt felt was also holding her family captive. Ms. Navarro’s degree was on indefinite pause because her shifting hours left her unable to commit to classes. She needed to work all she could, sometimes counting on dimes from the tip jar to make the bus fare home. If she dared ask for more stable hours, she feared, she would get fewer work hours over all.

An excellent, if damning, piece on the hardships associated with ‘flexible’ scheduling and low-paying jobs.

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Aside

Application, In!

Well, first faculty job applied for. This finishing the dissertation and moving on in life stuff is feeling a lot more pressing now.