Computer Monitoring of Employees In this

I will put the controversy into an historical, political, sociological, legal, and ethical context. I will look at it from the point of view of management as well as labor. And I will also add a dollop of George Orwell, Jeremy Bentham and other maverick points of view to slice through the smug assumptions of corporate thinking and lay bare the contradictions between the supposed democracy in which we live, and the autocratic tendencies of the current American workplace.

With the rise of civilization in the Middle East about 5,000 years ago came the division of labor along lines of social class, which with endless variations continues to this day. The vast majority of people were slaves who served the interests of the hereditary rulers, warlords, and land-owning aristocrats. When the Renaissance ushered in the rise of capitalism and a money economy, a newly aggressive bourgeois class challenged the rights of kings and nobles. But upon gaining power they treated their employees much as the slaves, peasants, or serfs had been treated by royalty and the aristocracy. The wildly bloated CEO salaries and perks of today's corporate leaders put the wealth kings and dukes of the past to shame.

In the first half of the 20th century business leaders such as Henr

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e of the alleged sexual harassment resulting from finding an email on the company server that made a series of jokes on the theme that "beer is better than women" (Hartman 1998). On the other hand, companies which go too far in their workplace surveillance of employees may also be legally liable for damages, as the Boston Sheraton discovered when it had to pay a $200,000 settlement after it was caught secretly monitoring the employees' locker room (ibid.) The practical reasons for company surveillance of their workers behavior in cyberspace are obvious, and in the context of their limited interests and worldview, understandable and to some degree reasonable. They clearly must protect against criminal hacking and discrimination for their own financial and legal self-preservation. But there is a much larger issue that is nearly always ignored by conventional corporate thinking, and that is the issue of human rights. The capitalist view is that since we own the company and its resources, we have the sole right to control our property and our employees. If they don't like it, they can leave. Case closed. But this ignores the fact that people in a capitalist economy have no choice but to work for reasons of sheer survival, and th
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Approximate Word count = 2728
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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