READING

Snoopers at Work

BILL BRYSON

Bill Bryson (b. 1951) grew up in the United States but lived from 1977 to 1995 in England and returned there in 2003. Originally a newspaper writer, Bryson is well known for his travel books, which include I’m a Stranger Here Myself (1999) and Bill Bryson’s African Diary (2002). Some of his more recent books include At Home: A Short History of Private Life (2010) and One Summer: America 1927 (2013).

The essays in I’m a Stranger Here Myself began as Sunday columns in a British newspaper, The Mail. In the following piece from that collection, Bryson discusses employers’ invasion of workers’ privacy. As you read, pay attention to the kinds of examples the author chooses to illustrate this disturbing trend, and notice how he uses humor to comment on the material. Consider, too, how Bryson uses the elements of illustration discussed in this chapter.

Now here is something to bear in mind should you ever find yourself using a changing room in a department store or other retail establishment. It is perfectly legal — indeed, it is evidently routine — for the store to spy on you while you are trying on their clothes.

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I know this because I have just been reading a book by Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy called The Right to Privacy, which is full of alarming tales of ways that businesses and employers can — and enthusiastically do — intrude into what would normally be considered private affairs.

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The business of changing-cubicle spying came to light in 1983 when a customer trying on clothes in a department store in Michigan discovered that a store employee had climbed a stepladder and was watching him through a metal vent. (Is this tacky or what?) The customer was sufficiently outraged that he sued the store for invasion of privacy. He lost. A state court held that it was reasonable for retailers to defend against shoplifting by engaging in such surveillance.

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He shouldn’t have been surprised. Nearly everyone is being spied on in some way in America these days. A combination of technological advances, employer paranoia, and commercial avarice means that many millions of Americans are having their lives delved into in ways that would have been impossible, not to say unthinkable, a dozen years ago. . . .

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Many companies are taking advantage of technological possibilities to make their businesses more ruthlessly productive. In Maryland, according to Time magazine, a bank searched through the medical records of its borrowers — apparently quite legally — to find out which of them had life-threatening illnesses and used this information to cancel their loans. Other companies have focused not on customers but on their own employees — for instance, to check what prescription drugs the employees are taking. One large, well-known company teamed up with a pharmaceutical firm to comb through the health records of employees to see who might benefit from a dose of antidepressants. The idea was that the company would get more serene workers; the drug company would get more customers.

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According to the American Management Association two-thirds of companies in the United States spy on their employees in some way. Thirty-five percent track phone calls, and 10 percent actually tape phone conversations to review at leisure later. About a quarter of companies surveyed admitted to going through their employees’ computer files and reading their e-mail.

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Still other companies are secretly watching their employees at work. A secretary at a college in Massachusetts discovered that a hidden video camera was filming her office twenty-four hours a day. Goodness knows what the school authorities were hoping to find. What they got were images of a woman changing out of her work clothes and into a track suit each night in order to jog home from work. She is suing and will probably get a pot of money. But elsewhere courts have upheld companies’ rights to spy on their workers.

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There is a particular paranoia about drugs. I have a friend who got a job with a large manufacturing company in Iowa a year or so ago. Across the street from the company was a tavern that was the company after-hours hangout. One night my friend was having a beer after work with his colleagues when he was approached by a fellow employee who asked if he knew where she could get some marijuana. He said he didn’t use the stuff himself, but to get rid of her — for she was very persistent — he gave her the phone number of an acquaintance who sometimes sold it.

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The next day he was fired. The woman, it turned out, was a company spy employed solely to weed out drug use in the company. He hadn’t supplied her with marijuana, you understand, hadn’t encouraged her to use marijuana, and had stressed that he didn’t use marijuana himself. Nonetheless he was fired for encouraging and abetting the use of an illegal substance.

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Already, 91 percent of large companies — I find this almost unbelievable — now test some of their workers for drugs. Scores of companies have introduced what are called TAD rules — TAD being short for “tobacco, alcohol, and drugs” — which prohibit employees from using any of these substances at any time, including at home. There are companies, if you can believe it, that forbid their employees to drink or smoke at any time — even one beer, even on a Saturday night — and enforce the rules by making their workers give urine samples.

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But it gets even more sinister than that. Two leading electronics companies working together have invented something called an “active badge,” which tracks the movements of any worker compelled to wear one. The badge sends out an infrared signal every fifteen seconds. This signal is received by a central computer, which is thus able to keep a record of where every employee is and has been, whom they have associated with, how many times they have been to the toilet or water cooler — in short, to log every single action of their working day. If that isn’t ominous, I don’t know what is.

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However, there is one development, I am pleased to report, that makes all of this worthwhile. A company in New Jersey has patented a device for determining whether restaurant employees have washed their hands after using the lavatory. Now that I can go for.

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