You subject yourself to constant surveillance all in the name of employment.
Not so long ago, no American would have ever agreed to a working environment where the boss could record his movements, monitor his communications and remove every vestige of privacy. Now, it’s a precondition to employment.
You’re told that if you don’t agree with this, then you must have something to hide. You must have ill intentions.
I disagree.
But disagreement won’t help you keep a corporate job. You MUST agree to their policies in order to get hired. It’s all in the “employee handbook” that you signed in order to get the job.
Why do American companies distrust their employees so much?
More importantly, why do you accept this as normal and suffer it?
The answer to the first question is that corporations don’t view you as an intelligent individual of great worth. You are a human resource, a production unit, and you need to be managed and optimized in order to milk the maximum amount of work out of you at the minimum cost (this is called efficiency). You can’t be trusted because without management you are only a child to them and incapable of making consistently correct decisions independently.
It will be difficult to change this lack of trust immediately, so it may be of more value to focus on the second question - your acceptance of this employment arrangement.
You might think that you accept this corporate police-state policy because you have no other choice; you need a decent-paying job to pay the bills and raise kids; you were trained for this type of work; the economy is tight and finding good jobs is hard to do. If you think this way then you’re right about one thing - you were, in fact, trained for this type of work.
Not only that, but you were trained to think that this is your only option. From the day you stepped into a kindergarten class, you have been prepared to believe that you need to follow their proscribed path to employability, or else you’ll never be able to compete as an adult.
I’ll let you in on a little secret: they’re wrong. You are intelligent and capable, despite what they believe. You don’t need to be a cog in their machine in order to succeed.
Now you know. What will you do about it?
