THE SPY WHO FIRED ME the Human Costs of Workplace Monitoring by ESTHER KAPLAN

Garry Wills on the u A Lost Story by u William T. Vollmann Future of Catholicism Vladimir Nabokov Visits Fukushima HARPER’S MAGAZINE/MARCH 2015 $6.99 THE SPY WHO FIRED ME The human costs of workplace monitoring BY ESTHER KAPLAN u A GRAND JUROR SPEAKS The Inside Story of How Prosecutors Always Get Their Way BY GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS GIVING UP THE GHOST The Eternal Allure of Life After Death BY LESLIE JAMISON REPORT THE SPY WHO FIRED ME The human costs of workplace monitoring By Esther Kaplan ast March, Jim data into metrics to be Cramer,L the host of factored in to your per- CNBC’s Mad Money, formance reviews and devoted part of his decisions about how show to a company much you’ll be paid. called Cornerstone Miller’s company is OnDemand. Corner- part of an $11 billion stone, Cramer shouted industry that also at the camera, is “a includes workforce- cloud-based-software- management systems as-a-service play” in the such as Kronos and “talent- management” “enterprise social” plat- field. Companies that forms such as Micro- use its platform can soft’s Yammer, Sales- quickly assess an em- force’s Chatter, and, ployee’s performance by soon, Facebook at analyzing his or her on- Work. Every aspect of line interactions, in- an office worker’s life cluding emails, instant can now be measured, messages, and Web use. and an increasing “We’ve been manag- number of corporations ing people exactly the and institutions—from same way for the last cosmetics companies hundred and fifty to car-rental agencies— years,” Cornerstone’s are using that informa- CEO, Adam Miller, tion to make hiring told Cramer. With the and firing decisions. rise of the global workforce, the re- the vanguard of big data in the cloud” Cramer, for one, is bullish on the idea: mote workforce, the smartphone and and a leader in the “gamification of per- investing in companies like Corner- the tablet, it’s time to “manage people formance management.” To be assessed stone, he said, “can make you boatloads differently.” Clients include Virgin by Cornerstone is to have your collab- of money literally year after year!” Media, Barclays, and Starwood Hotels. orative partnerships scored as assets and A survey from the American Cornerstone, as Miller likes to tell your brainstorms rewarded with elec- Management Association found investors, is positioning itself to be “on tronic badges (genius idea!). It is to have that 66 percent of employers moni- scads of information swept up about tor the Internet use of their employ- Esther Kaplan is the editor of the Investiga- what you do each day, whom you com- ees, 45 percent track employee key- tive Fund at the Nation Institute and was a municate with, and what you communi- strokes, and 43 percent monitor 2013–2014 Alicia Patterson Fellow. cate about. Cornerstone converts that employee email. Only two states, Illustrations by John Ritter REPORT 31 Delaware and Connecticut, require standard set of metrics for measuring was introduced as a safety measure companies to inform their employ- R.O.I.” Yet this has hardly when it was rolled out in New York ees that such monitoring is taking slowed adoption. six or seven years ago. Lists were place. According to Marc Smith, a posted at distribution centers to sociologist with the Social Media first got interested in the data- shame the biggest seat-belt scofflaws. Research Foundation, “Anything drivenI workforce not long after I But safety is not the reason given for you do with a piece of hardware moved from a dilapidated apartment telematics on UPS investor calls. On that’s provided to you by the em- in Brooklyn that had a live-in super to those, executives speak instead about ployer, every keystroke, is the prop- a slightly more solid walk-up that does the potential for telematics to save erty of the employer. Personal calls, not. I began to notice something frus- the firm $100 million in operating private photos—if you put it on the trating about my UPS deliveries. They efficiencies, including reductions in company laptop, your company never arrived. When I wasn’t home, fuel, maintenance, and labor. owns it. They may analyze any elec- I’d leave a note asking for packages to Indeed, around the time telematics tronic record at any time for any be left at the laundromat on the cor- was being introduced in New York, purpose. It’s not your data.” ner. I’d get an attempted- delivery note UPS began to increase the number of With the advent of wireless con- instead. The same thing sometimes stops on each route. At morning meet- nectivity, along with a steep drop in happened even when I was home—I’d ings at the distribution center, Rose told the price of computer processors, find an attempted-delivery note, but me, supervisors would announce, “Hey, electronic sensors, GPS devices, and no one had rung my doorbell. Packag- your stop count is going up by ten.” As radio-frequency identification tags, es were routinely returned to sender. recently as a decade ago, a driver’s stop monitoring has become common- Then I learned about UPS’s use of count might be eighty-five, but in re- place. Many retail workers now something called telematics. cent years it rose to ninety-five, then a clock in with a thumb scan. Nurses Telematics is a neologism coined hundred. These numbers are reflected wear badges that track how often from two other neologisms— in UPS corporate filings, which show they wash their hands. Warehouse tele communications and informatics— that daily domestic package deliveries workers carry devices that assign to describe technologies that wire- grew by 1.4 million between 2009 and them their next task and give them lessly transmit data from remote 2013, the years in which telematics was a time by which they must complete sensors and GPS devices to computers being rolled out—and these addition- it. Some may soon be outfitted with for analysis. The telematics system that al packages were delivered by a thou- augmented- reality devices to more now governs the working life of a driv- sand fewer drivers. Total domestic efficiently locate products. er for UPS includes handheld DIADs, employees shrank during the same In industry after industry, this or delivery- information acquisition period by 22,000. data collection is part of an expen- devices, as well as more than 200 sen- These days, on an average shift, Rose sive, high-tech effort to squeeze ev- sors on each delivery truck that track makes 110 stops and delivers 400 pack- ery last drop of productivity from everything from backup speeds to stop ages. He leaves his house at seven in the corporate workforces, an effort that times to seat-belt use. When a driver morning and seldom gets home before pushes employees to their mental, stops and scans a package for delivery, nine-thirty at night, when he is so ex- emotional, and physical limits; the system records the time and loca- hausted that he rarely makes it to bed— claims control over their working tion; it records these details again he grabs dinner and passes out on the and nonworking hours; and com- when a customer signs for the package. couch. “If you go to one of these UPS pensates them as little as possible, Much of this information flows to a facilities at shift-change time, you’d even at the risk of violating labor supervisor in real time. The Teamsters, think you were at a football game, the laws. In some cases, these new sys- the union that represents UPS employ- way people are limping, bent over, with tems produce impressive results for ees, won contract language that says shoulder injuries, neck injuries, knee the bottom line: after Unified Gro- drivers can’t be fired based solely on injuries,” said David Levin, an orga- cers, a large wholesaler, implement- the numbers in their telematics re- nizer with Teamsters for a Democratic ed an electronic tasking system for ports, but supervisors have found work- Union, a reform caucus within the its warehouse workers, the firm was arounds, and telematics- related firings Teamsters. “It’s fifteen years of rushing, able to cut payroll expenses by have become routine. rushing, rushing, working when you’re 25 percent while increasing sales by One warm day last fall I met with exhausted, working those long days, 36 percent. A 2013 study of five a man I’ll call Jeff Rose, who for the running up and down stairs with boxes.” chain restaurants found that elec- past fifteen years has driven a UPS Rose told me he knows at least ten tronic monitoring decreased em- delivery route in a working-class drivers at his facility who have had ployee theft and increased hourly neighborhood in one of New York knee or shoulder surgery. He suffers sales. In other cases, however, the City’s outer boroughs. He was taking from chronic back pain, but a sur- return on investment isn’t so clear. his two o’clock lunch break at a din- geon told him there was no point in As one Cornerstone report says of er on the corner of a modest com- operating—he has so many different corporate social- networking tools, mercial strip and a leafy residential injuries that surgery won’t help. UPS “There is no generally accepted street. Rose, who asked that I not use coaches drivers to follow eight rules model for their implementation or his real name, said that telematics for safe lifting, which Rose rattled off 32 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2015 the data from a single driver’s shift can be up to forty pages long.

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