I love this

>and worry that it will normalize workplace surveillance, even when people return to the office.

This was normal before people left the office...

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I don’t understand why companies feel the need to put monitoring software in. Assign work. If the work is being completed in a timely manner then it shouldn’t matter it they spent 30 hours or 40 hours on it.

If the work is not being completed in a timely manner then figure out if more training is required or if the work load is too much. If neither is the issue then put the employee on notice. If it still doesn’t improve then fire them.

In none of these situations does it matter if the employee watched disney for 3 hours a day. That would be found out just from seeing if the work is being completed.

edit: Quite a few people have said that I’m missing that she is hourly.

Even being hourly I still think an argument could be made that such a level of monitoring would still not be necessary. If I ask someone to do a specific task then I should have an approximate idea of how long that task would take. If they then bill me for far more time than I expect I should start asking detailed questions. Bullshit isn’t often hard to detect.

If it continues then I’d either need to adjust my expectations or replace the worker. We’ve all known people that drag their feet; both salary and hourly. Good management should have regular status meetings with their employees so that this doesn’t go unnoticed or uncorrected.

The work I do requires a short daily meeting for a team of 10 people that takes about 15 minutes. Some of our group is salary, some bill their 40 hours each week. As a group we estimate the time frame the work can be completed in and as a group we divide up who does what. During our daily status meeting we say how it’s going. This method makes it very very difficult for anyone to drag their feet. If someone is taking too long then we dig into why. Sure someone could slide for a day or two but not any longer than that before the problem would be fixed.

None of this requires nanny software. I still feel that nanny software is a crutch for bad management. Maybe instead of constantly reading reports about how often a document is accessed or a mouse is moved they could just keep an open dialogue with their employees.

I agree in principal but that doesn't make it ok to commit fraud. I would not choose to work for a company that micromanaged my time like that but if it was the situation them I can't just make up hours I worked and bill the company for them.

Paying hourly for work like this only encourages poor and inefficient work. Better to set a salary and expect the employee to finish the tasks assigned to them each day/week. But that isn't the agreement she had when she started working

There are companies and jobs that pay salary. Maybe she should work for those and leave the hourly wage job for people who want to work hourly

The redditors that defend corps who don't give a fuck about them are off-putting

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Now do mechanic shop rates

While I'm also against software that monitors mouse movements or other spyware-like stuff, I think monitoring how often the remote worker interacts with the work server (or, probably less often, work-related local files) is legit and seems like a good way to figure out if people are actually working while being clocked in during remote work. That has nothing to do with monitoring productivity or similar.

> I can't just make up hours I worked and bill the company for them.

Actually, that's exactly how most contractors do it.

Wage theft by employers is the biggest money crime in the US. We will see stories like this, but nothing about the much larger crime of rich people stealing from workers. Par for the course in America

Some people want to think that wage theft by employers is not a much larger and more common crime. Fraud is not ok, but this story is isolated, wage theft is not.

That's why you just screw around with the mouse every 5 minutes while you're watching a movie at home.

50 hours over what kind of timeframe? Is it like, 50 hours over 6 months? Because that’s only about half an hour a day, and no one can tell me that they haven’t just absolutely wasted half an hour on the clock doing something stupid, or even nothing at all. The fact that the time frame isn’t mentioned is kind of chilling, because it leaves it to us, the readers, to determine who is in the right when we don’t even have a frame of reference for when the supposed “crime” occurred.

The use of monitoring software or personal computers is a very uncomfortable idea, and the fact that companies can monitor your every second of activity and determine what you’re doing and for how long is certainly a big brother-esque line of monitoring.

I think at the end of the day, businesses should only care about the results. If remote work lets people deliver the same results using less time, then adjust for that. But there’s no reason to do shit like this, when it’s a well known fact that corporate wage theft steals far more every year than someone taking a 20 minute shit on the clock

Then we they get caught committing fraud they should have to pay. Everyone else does it is a kindergarten excuse

If a company hires me, they're paying for my work, not for a hypothetical platonic ideal employee's work.
That guy costs way more.

What you're talking about is a salaried employee.

As far as an hourly wage is concerned, it's just the best system of measurement for most jobs. It's based on the idea that you pay for what you use. If I use 30 hours of your time, I'm not going to pay you for 40.

Would you pay a 500 dollar utility bill if you'd only used 100 dollars worth of said utility?

Genuinely curious how old you are?

If you read this article there was clear admission of lying about logging hours by the employee. However, that aside I think software to track productivity is pretty garbage way in a lot of jobs to keep track of employees. Example, I do a ton of research as part of my job and often that's reading from books, or looking up things in hardcopy form that didn't come from my laptop. Also I do a fair amount of design or planning on a white board I keep next to my desk. Often my computer goes to sleep in those times but I'm definitely still working. Production metrics are way better measures of work than raw time in an application.

The problem is that companies want employees to be productive 100% of the time, which is simply not possible. They install software like that to ensure employees are on task as much as possible and oftentimes it's only used as a means to fire for cause when it's convenient for the company, or as a means to deny pay increases.

This management style is more prevalent in retail or food service ("if you got time to lean, you got time to clean"), but it's been creeping into other work sectors for a while now.

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Not to be that guy/gal, but if work isn’t being completed on time, this could actually just be a lazy person who is purposefully putting in little effort. No amount of training is going to fix that. When I managed folks, if you were at the bottom of pile regarding amount of work you completed in the same time as other colleagues, you were offered training (which involved repeating things folks already knew) or you were counseled out - either way chances are you don’t/didn’t like the work, so why continue being miserable. Why should I keep paying the low performer, when I can just use that training time for a new employee who is willing to put in the work. You can make the argument that it is costlier to hire new employees, but the toll low performers take on the moral of the rest of team isn’t great either. How would you feel knowing that someone who puts in 30% of your effort, gets paid similarly (granted performance based bonus and raises are highly variable)

Also read the article. It has absolutely nothing to do with someone having too much work to do in a small amount of time. She even admits she mis-logged as well as claims to have been working with paper documents of which she doesn’t have any proof of.

She knew she was in the wrong, why not just pay the 2000 and move on. Why take this to a tribunal and have your name published in public forums as either a thief, or a person that can’t use what sounds like fairly basic technology?

sounds like the employer is the thief here.

I got a check in the mail from a class action against a former employer for just that stealing break pay I think it was. It was a huge company. I never heard about it in the news anywhere. Just a check showed up in the mail one day didn’t even know it was coming.

>it shouldn’t matter it they spent 30 hours or 40 hours on it.

It does if your company is a on a contract. Every hour gets billed to the customer and has to be justified, or else the company is stealing from the customer.

They were probably getting sued and wanted to look good before trial came.

Not sure why article belongs on this subreddit.

Maybe she shouldn't have misrepresented over 50 hours at work.

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This is my problem with my current job. People are getting in trouble for fucking humming.

At my job, the problem is that my managers don't want to admit that more training is required. "But it's so easy!" is what they always say. Well, yes, it is easy if you have been doing it almost every day for ten years, Michelle. And no, I did not have training. I say with the receptionist while she did her job, which is completely different from the job I am currently doing, and the several people who were supposed to train me decided that they should just talk about their crappy marriages on Teams during training.

But no, I am clearly the problem (:

What's stupid to me is that my compy expects this and expects us to be friendly and polite and partake in social activities with our coworkers. And some workers are allowed to do this while I'm told to "get back to work" and watch people just talk to each other for a full half hour.

I waste half an hour every hour I’m at work

I have this problem with my singers! I pay them to sing and all they want to do is hum! /s

I’m just saying. I’m not adverse to productivity monitoring. I think it should be disclosed though by the employer, to be fair?

She knew she was breaching a policy. She didn't expect to get caught. Perhaps moving forward, all remote employees have this software. Almost all commercial trucking companies have GPS on their vehicles...

The dispute began last year when Besse claimed she was fired without "just cause."

Right, I'm sure she was a model employee, and not a lazy bum.

She admitted to the theft.

Fuck that company, and fuck that general culture. When my job is done, I AM DONE. I can chill, boot up my steam deck and lay in my hammock. I've literally been woken up by my boss, and all he wanted was to bum a smoke. He knows that hardly anyone is willing to go and do what we do, and he takes care of us. We take a couple weeks to build entire festivals and tear it down and ship it back to the warehouse in less than 4 days.

This. 50 hours could be over 6 months or a year.What's next? They are going to make us pay back if we take multiple bathroom breaks? Plus tell me that as a wage worker you never logged in hour extra here and there. Not to talk about privacy issues. We are losing privacy, basic human right, in small increments every day. It became normal to track our phones, it became normal to steal our data, it became normal to observe every little move we make. It's just futile to even fight that fight in this day and age.

Yes but if you have 10 extra hours thats time to work on organizing a union or a civil protest. Cant give the slaves that kind of time

He’s a she, dude

He never claimed otherwise, shtinky

> that guy costs way more

Who is that in reference to?

He is referring to a hypothetical version of himself.

My bad, wasn’t clear to me

The system is built by the rich, and the rich keep it.

“The door is shut “

I'm a sysadmin and have deployed these tools to clients in my last job. That's not gonna cut it, they'll track what you open, which windows are in focus, keyboard + mouse activity, files opened, etc. If they wanna get you with this, they're gonna get you.

People are so petty for those downvotes, lol. You owned up to it

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. M m.7

How about she shouldn't steal time in the first place?

Ok. Make sure you punch out for every bathroom break, every personal conversation, and smoke break if you take them, and you better not work slow.

Look. If she actually just sat around and did nothing for hours on end, then yeah she should get in trouble. But the fact that they don’t mention a timeframe makes seem as if she sat for a week without working at all, when we’ve all been guilty of wasting time on the clock, and in the strictest sense, that’s stealing time. But I’ve also done favors for and helped people without being on the clock after being asked to do so, and that is on me, but for other people they are required to do work off the clock and that’s wage theft.

So you can sit here and sniff this companies taint if you want, but I don’t feel bad for them. If she truly stole time, then she got caught; I just hope that we eventually start catching more companies that are stealing time from its employees.

Okay most companies are okay with paid smoke breaks and shitting. This woman had to do something egregious to have the company tell her to pay em. Most companies wouldn't go so hard if it wasn't that serious.

If I had an employee dicking around while they should be working and I was paying em I'd be pissed. Wouldn't you?

This was in Canada, it's the second word in the article.

I think productivity monitoring is bullshit. I'll agree it's nice in theory, but it's usually impossible to pull off in a fair or mostly fair way.

I'm a software developer, and I can spend a day going off in a direction that ends up being useless. Some jobs look easy but end up being very difficult and vice versa.

A friend does something to do with approving loans. Some clients are simply more difficult and complicated than others, in ways that can't be predicted by performance measuring software.

To be honest, I think the only jobs where it can work are those that have someone doing something identical in a repetitive manner, though robots have replaced most of those, or jobs that are small enough that you can mostly fit the time required to a simple equation, such as those that pack groceries for delivery.

They only had her download it after she wasn’t doing her work.

Welp, if you think time billing is fraud, good luck going after the lawyer that's charging you in hour increments for two-minute phone calls. Three short calls in half an hour? That's three billable hours. Whether you think it's fraud is irrelevant - the law does not, because the people that are in the business of law make a lot of money from that being the case.

"Time theft" only exists for employees. This is by design to protect wealth, like most laws regarding money. It's not fraud to bill for a made-up amount of time, it's literally how all time billing except for employee wages is done. Only "wage earners" are paid by the minute. Some employers actually calculate down to the six second interval (tenth of a minute). Meanwhile, the overnight parking garage gets to round up to the nearest four hour increment. Who's really "committing" anything here - the lady getting her job done quickly, or the folks claiming they overpaid after the job is done?

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Damn, capitalism really has you simping for corporate America.

That's also a big part of what is killing the trucking industry.

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If they are getting the job done to your needs, then you damn sure shouldn't be pissed.

I spend half my work day on reddit, Facebook, or working on hobbies, because my job has a lot of wait time built in. There is nothing else to do. My job is to be there, waiting for instruction. Would you be pissed if I was waiting and not pumping metrics?

I'm probably not too far off. Sad part is I'm still the top performer in my group by a wide margin.

I actually think a lot of it is because others spend a lot of time trying to figure things out themselves instead of getting the information from someone who already knows it. The second I realize it's going to take me a long time to figure something out on my own I'm like "OK, who the hell can tell me how this works? I'm not wasting my time on this shit."

I'm a software developer.

What if you required me for ten hours of my time for a day, but you had only five hours of work for me to do, but you needed me to be there for those ten hours just in case other work came up? And what if I spent that extra five hours just doing whatever I wanted?

Then I'd pay you for ten and you can enjoy those extra five hours sticking around in case something comes up on your phone or the internet.

In every job I've ever had, that's pretty much how it goes.

Okay, then we are in agreement. That's pretty much what my job is. I'm there for 12-14 hours. But on a normal day, I do maybe 3-4 hours of actual work. The rest of the time is spent on hobbies or scrolling until I find the end of the internet. But, that's what the job is.

She could be a super villain with that ability to steal time itself

People are downvoting because the poster literally said "me" in their comment. It isn't that this person didn't understand, they didn't read it thoroughly. They got mad about something they didn't read all the way. It honestly deserves a downvote.

>They are going to make us pay back if we take multiple bathroom breaks?

Actually yes, that's a thing that happens in corporate America.

She was logging time per file but the software showed she never opened some of the files. She admitted to this.

It’s also partially about plausible deniability - “no you aren’t getting promoted/kept on, due to resisting my sexual advances, the timesheets are the problem!”

Used to work for a company where I automated everything.

(made the mistake of going above and beyond and helping my colleagues and was rewarded with an annual 15 cent raise to $15.15 for taking months of work and turning it into an hour).

I also had that same manager who gave me my shitty raise get pissy with me when I had no work to do and when I asked for work, she told me to figure it out.

So I worked roughly 30 minutes every day, and sat on my ass browsing imgur and reddit for my entire shift, because hard work came with punishments.

I did the same exact work as my colleagues, I just did it ridiculously faster than them because I was the only one who knew code and was licensed with the marketing software we used.

I feel like this whole argument could be averted if they would just pay people on salary. Like, I pay you to be on call for my companies issues, heres a yearly salary. I dont care how long anything takes just get it done, please. This seems to be the issue here, not enough work to pay for the time that they hired for.

This is turning out like school. Long class, lecture finishes, homeWORK assigned, then use whatever time left to work on the assignment. I remember the smarter ones finishing before class ended, thus being "paid" for work that should have taken longer. They got the same grade as someone who took hours to get the same results, while accomplishing it in mere minutes.

1 month, or an average of 2 and a half hours per day.

In addition she admitted to submitted bad timesheets and of lying about hours worked as well and offered up no proof of work on outside PC work. Notably whenever she claimed she was doing offline work she never at any point uploaded any results of said work or offered up any other proof.

Also she only had productivity software due to bad performance previously.

>The second I realize it's going to take me a long time to figure something out on my own I'm like "OK, who the hell can tell me how this works? I'm not wasting my time on this shit."
>
>I'm a software developer.

Same way here. And somehow people look at me funny when I say "No, I'm not going to spend 30 mins researching this when there should be a readily available answer, someone just has to tell me where to find the answer and save us all time."

Why is common sense so uncommon? It's almost like I'm trying not to waste your time by not wasting my time.

Stealing over 50 hrs worth of money is “not a crime” to you?

It was worth $2,746. I feel like stealing such an amount is big enough to deem it a crime.

Sounds like you didn’t read the article.

"I've plugged time to files that I didn't touch and that wasn't right or appropriate in any way or fashion, and I recognize that and so for that I'm really sorry,"

​

So, she admits to wasting company time and NOT doing her job when she actually says she is, and then expects to NOT have pay price of fraud? Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

“Wage theft by employers”

What are you talking about?

Because she fraudulently submitted her time?

Is this in this particular article and I’m just a bad reader or was it from another article?

I mean l, blatantly ripping off hours at a time is plain stupid. If this was over a long period of time and they were just snooping it’s quit me different.

I stand by my claim that businesses get far too much leeway in wage theft, so if someone wants to wait 5-10 minutes every so often before flouncing out I’m not gonna complain; but if she effectively just punched in and left, then it’s on her.

Not me, I came here for an explanation like this. Got shocked a few hours ago by a spicy link... My hands still a little shakey

You have a point; The platonic ideal employee might not be a guy. Might not be a gal, either.

Employers paying less than they are supposed to or agreed to. Most common are things like not paying increased rate for overtime or making people work through breaks and work off the clock before or after their shift.

Yes, result based measuring is the best method of measurement for employee productivity. It's simple, accurate, easily measured, and useful for productivity predictions. It also contributes to a more relaxed and stable work atmosphere. Also it forces employers to have clear, measurable goals and expectations. Which too many are lacking.

Timing screentime is just a silly game that over-controlling people feel like arbitrarily playing. It's inaccurate. People can spend all day working and get almost nothing done, and the other end of the spectrum exists too (which is punished by this method). It's also demeaning, people should be respected not treated like children and micro-managed.

We just read the judge's decision. It's over a period of one month. And it's clear that she was being deceptive in some way from the evidence provided, as she kept offering new excuses that changed the nature of what she was claiming every time she was presented with evidence challenging her previous excuse.

Also, this is in Canada, so we're less familiar with the specifics of the laws there. It does, however, present a nasty precedent for companies to take advantage of even in dissimilar situations.

Why is this posted in the sub Reddit? She falsified her time sheets and stole time. It’s pretty standard for people who are found guilty of doing that to have to pay restitution to the employer for the payroll that they stole.

good on her honestly

This law should also work the other way round then

“Employers paying less than they are supposed to”

If your employer doesn’t pay you the proper amount, you can easily just report them and the government will force them to pay you along with possible fines. So they’d get screwed over real quick for almost no effort on the workers part.

“Work off the clock”

I don’t understand. Do they hold a gun to the head of the employee or something? How are they FORCING someone to work off the clock?

I’ll not try to convince you. The info is from the US Dept of Labor. I have been pressured to come in early and work off the clock when the director of my department wanted to move the start times from 5:00am to 5:30am to avoid paying shift bonus. Most people don’t want an adversarial relationship with their employer so they go along with what the boss wants.

It’s good to be a fraud?

Odd sense of morals you have(or don’t have I should say).

she should have taken more tbh

“I have no proof and it’s easier to just continue to blindly assert my claim”

FTFY

So you mean “yes, it’s good to be a fraud”?

Whatever you say Jack. For some strange reason common people get weirdly offended when they hear that big corporations are taking advantage of workers. It’s really mysterious to me.

>people get weirdly offended when they hear that big corporations are taking advantage of workers.

Why would anyone get offended? That's basically what working for someone else always is?

Nevertheless, your statement doesn't refute or explain how a company FORCES you to work off the clock. But I understand that you can't actually come up with any kind of valid logic. So don't worry, I get that you're limited in your possible responses.

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Type ‘wage theft’ into your browser and learn all about it. Or don’t if you don’t want to- I don’t t really care. This isn’t something I’m making up, it’s a finding of the federal government. If you’re siding with huge corporations rather than your friends, family and yourself, that’s up to you.

>wage theft

Type in "how to address wage theft" into your browser. You'll learn that its very straightforward to fix. But if you want to play such an ignorant act, go ahead. I really don't care.

>If you’re siding with huge corporations rather than your friends

Are you being intentionally daft? I literally said "Report the business". Can you not read very well? I would suggest going back and actually reading what is being written. Then triple check it before you start typing nonsense.

F U troll.

I said I don't care if you want to play such an ignorant act, it doesn't mean that i'll actively support your intentional ignorance.

Seriously, grow up.

Your the one playing the act of the awkward kid who gets picked on in school so he goes on line and talks shit to grownups. I’ll try again: F U, you stupid troll.

Absolutely no part of your response has been valid. It's mostly just been you covering your ears with your hands while you yell. Good luck with that disability. I'm sure life is tough for you.

You are a stupid ignorant troll 🧌

That’s rich coming from the person who can’t read yet constantly froths at the mouth. I’m still waiting on an actual retort.

I don’t retort trolls or defend facts.

If I’m a troll, why are you still responding then? What a scrub….

Because I’m amused by your impotence. Something about wage theft being a major crime in America struck a nerve.

A lot of ad hominem and zero rational retorts. You don’t even have a clue on how to converse huh? Life really must be rough on you…..

I’m still waiting for an actual response.

You’ll wait for a very long time. You can’t accept a true statement. I can’t help you with that.

“You’ll wait for a very long time”

Yeah, I gotta wait for you to grow up. That definitely will take a while.

So I’ll speak to you again if that ever happens. Until then, good luck!