Implied federal government teleworker misconduct
Some implied federal government teleworker misconduct may stem around these activities:
- purporting to be clocked in to home office workstation but not attending to remote job related tasks,
- teleworking two fulltime jobs without informing supervisors and/or without authorization,
- slow walking projects,
- failing to fully engage (be present and accessible) remote team members on virtual team projects.
Research points to meager reports of employee abuse in workplace
As we seek actual workforce data (not global estimates or aggregate data) to determine whether the allegations are true, it might be time to swivel the spotlight to private employers. Interesting studies from Israel and Canada offer insight into the potential for employer abuse of employees. The data revealed ‘meager’ abuses according to the research cited in Frontier Psychology. Further, the social scientists described limitations to their research such that, “because the differences found in all the variables in our investigation investigated were not significant, we cannot conclude that the results indicate a trend.” Even so, some reported abuses related to:
- denigrating certain employees in the presence of my work colleagues, and
- discouraging specifically targeted workers from interacting with other work peers.
10% of workforce may experience supervisory abuse
A careful literature review of prominent research in the fields of occupational psychology and industrial / organizational psychology give estimates of approximately 10% of of employees experience supervisory abuse (Tepper, B.J., Consequences of abusive supervision. American Psychology. 43, 178–190, 2000). Some of the types of abusive supervisory behaviors were:
- threatening physical abuse,
- devaluing the opinions of the targeted employees during brainstorming sessions and open discussions in front of their peers
- excluding and intentionally ignoring certain employees from group meetings and/or social gatherings,
- showing acts of physical and/or verbal aggression against an employee,
- assigning challenging tasks with unfeasible goals, few resources, and unrealistic deadlines by which to accomplish
- justifying reprimands, reprisals, punishments and oversurveillance with poor performance reviews
- invading personal space and privacy (without prior notice or consent) by hacking into their emails (Indeed Editorial Team, 2023)
Mistreatment of staff may be more prevalent in private sector
But getting back to the Canadian and Israeli research. As they affirmed workplace abuse of employees can be experienced in certain workplaces, they concluded the mistreatment of employees may be more prevalent in the private sector than the government. The ill-treatment of employees (particularly lower level, nonmanagerial staff) was identified most frequently in private companies than the public sector.
Using the results of this study as a backdrop, we searched to see if we could find potential evidence of employer maltreatment of their workforce. We admit we may have an ulterior motive. To possibly to deflect the attention from the misconduct of employees to employers, maybe? Our review of major media reports demonstrated many big technology companies requiring workers to complete remote job tasks (grade, research, fact check, and analyze artificial intelligence inputs and outputs) with impossible timelines of under three minutes.
Example of Google AI contractors overworked and scared
An article titled, “Google’s AI contractors say they are underpaid, overworked and scared,” sought to raise the awareness for potential abuse of contractors assigned to develop artificial intelligence products. To rid the company of potential liabilities, large, big technology employers often employ the services of subcontractors like Appen Ltd. and Accenture Plc to parcel out the tedious work tasks to independent contractors. The pay for these workers working from home can be as low as $2.00 per hour (home based from Kenya) to $14.00 per hour in the United States.
Some ill-treatment in work settings may be related to caste
In addition to the potential for mishandling remote workers in general, there are reports of instances where workers employed in big technology companies can be treated differently because of their class standing in their home country.
The New Yorker interviewed Tanuja Gupta, formerly of Google. She referenced the June 2020 Cisco case where the state of California sued the company for ‘caste discrimination.’ During the interview, Ms. Gupta relayed this, ”
“I think the Cisco case is probably the most publicly known example—is that, within a team, when you’ve got people who are caste privileged and caste oppressed, the people who are caste oppressed start to be given inferior assignments, get treated differently, left out of meetings, which are certainly things that I heard from Google employees within the company. [The Google spokesperson said that caste discrimination has “no place in our workplace and it’s prohibited in our policies.”]
She added further, “this is not unique to Google. This is happening across tech because of the large number of South Asian employees.”
In denial there is a high risk of resurgence of discrimination
So as policy makers, politicians and corporate leaders grapple with workforce decisions impacting individual workers and group aligned workers of similar backgrounds, status, income and ethnicity; it is vital that a real world analysis is undertaken. We must not deny the risk of the potential of a resurgence of discriminating practices in the US. Already reverse discrimination may have occurred for the sake of misguided CRT policies and practices.
It would be shameful for society as a whole if the United States becomes bogged down in labor issues for which it has shrewdly eradicated solely for the benefit of oligarchs whose primary interest may be individual financial gain and global dominance.