#Remote Work Wellness

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Return to office and dying on the job

Denise Prudhomme's bosses at Wells Fargo insisted that the in-person camaraderie of their offices warranted a mandatory return-to-office policy, but when she died at her desk in her Tempe, AZ office, no one noticed for four days.

That was in August. Now, Wells Fargo United has published a statement on her death, one that vibrates with anger at the callously selective surveillance that Wells Fargo inflicts on its workforce:

https://www.reddit.com/r/WellsFargoUnited/comments/1fnp9fa/please_print_and_take_to_your_managersite_leader/

The union points out that Wells Fargo workers are subjected to continuous, fine-grained on-the-job surveillance from a variety of bossware tools that count their keystrokes and create tables of the distancess their mice cross each day:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

Wells Fargo's message to its workforce is, "You can't be trusted," a policy that Wells Fargo doubled down on with its Return to Office mandate. Return to Office is often pitched as a chance to improve teamwork, communication, and human connection with your co-workers, and there's no arguing with the idea that spending some time in person with people can help improve working relationships (I attended a week-long, all-hands, staff retreat for EFF earlier this month and it was fantastic, primarily due to its in-person nature).

But our bosses don't want us back in the office because they enjoy our company, nor because they're so excited about having hired such a swell bunch of folks and can't wait to see how we all get along together. As John Quiggin writes, the biggest reason to force us back to the office is to get a bunch of us to quit:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/sep/26/in-their-plaintive-call-for-a-return-to-the-office-ceos-reveal-how-little-they-are-needed

As one of Musk's toadies put it in a private message before the Twitter takeover, "Sharpen your blades boys. 2 day a week Office requirement = 20% voluntary departures":

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-twitter/

The other reason to spy on us is because they don't trust us. Remember all the panic about "quiet quitting" and "no one wants to work"? Bosses' hypothesis was that eking out a bare minimum living on from a couple of small-dollar covid stimulus checks was preferable to working for them for a full paycheck.

Every accusation is a a confession. When your boss tells you that he thinks that you can't be trusted to do a good job without total, constant surveillance, he's really saying, "I only bother to do my CEO job when I'm afraid of getting fired':

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

As Wells Fargo United notes, Wells Fargo employees like Denise Prudhomme are spied on from the moment they set foot in the building until the moment they clock out (and sometimes the spying continues when you're off the clock):

Wells Fargo monitors our every move and keystroke using remote, electronic technologies—purportedly to evaluate our productivity—and will fire us if we are caught not making enough keystrokes on our computers.

The Arizona Republic coverage notes further that Prudhomme had to log her comings and goings from the Wells Fargo offices with a badge, so Wells Fargo could see that Prudhomme had entered the premises four days before, but hadn't left:

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/tempe-breaking/2024/09/23/wells-fargo-employees-union-responds-death-tempe-woman/75352015007/

Wells Fargo has mandated in-person working, even when that means crossing a state line to be closer to the office. They've created "hub cities" where workers are supposed to turn up. This may sound convivial, but Prudhomme was the only member of her team working out of the Tempe hub, so she was being asked to leave her home, travel long distances, and spend her days in a distant corner of the building where no one ventured for periods of (at least) four days at a time.

Bosses are so convinced that they themselves would goof off if they could that they fixate on forcing employees to spend their days in the office, no matter what the cost. Back in March 2020, Charter CEO Tom Rutledge – then the highest-paid CEO in America – instituted a policy that every back office staffer had to work in person at his call centers. This was the most deadly phase of the pandemic, there was no PPE to speak of, we didn't understand transmission very well, and vaccines didn't exist yet. Charter is a telecommunications company and it was booming as workers across America upgraded their broadband so they could work from home, and the CEO's response was to ban remote work. His customer service centers were superspreading charnel houses:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#sociopathy

That Wells Fargo would leave a dead employee at her desk for four days is par for the course for the third-largest commercial bank in America. This is Wells Fargo, remember, the company that forced its low-level bank staff to open two million fake accounts in order to steal from their customers and defraud their shareholders, then fired and blackballed staff who complained:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/26/495454165/ex-wells-fargo-employees-sue-allege-they-were-punished-for-not-breaking-law

The executive who ran that swindle got a $125 million bonus:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/09/wells-fargo-ceos-teflon-don-act-backfires-at-senate-hearing-i-take-full-responsibility-means-anything-but.html

And the CEO got $200 million:

https://money.cnn.com/2016/09/21/investing/wells-fargo-fired-workers-retaliation-fake-accounts/index.html

It's not like Wells Fargo treats its workers badly but does well by everyone else. Remember, those fake accounts existed as part of a fraud on the company's investors. The company went on to steal $76m from its customers on currency conversions. They also foreclosed on customers who were up to date on their mortgages, seizing and selling off all their possessions. They argued that when bosses pressured tellers into forging customers on fraudulent account-opening paperwork, that those customers had lost their right to sue, since the fraudulent paperwork had a binding arbitration clause. When they finally agreed to pay restitution to their victims, they made the payments opt-in, ensuring that most of the millions of people they stole from would never get their money back.

They stole millions with fraudulent "home warranties." They stole millions from small businesses with fake credit-card fees. They defrauded 800,000 customers through an insurance scam, and stole 25,000 customers' cars with illegal repos. They led the pre-2008 pack on mis-selling deceptive mortgages that blew up and triggered the foreclosure epidemic. They loaned vast sums to Trump, who slashed their taxes, and then they fired 26.000 workers and did a $40.6B stock buyback. They stole 525 homes from mortgage borrowers and blamed it on a "computer glitch":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#too-big-to-jail

Given all this, two things are obvious: first, if anyone is going to be monitored for crimes, fraud and scams, it should be Wells Fargo, not its workers. Second, Wells Fargo's surveillance system exists solely to terrorize workers, not to help them. As Wells Fargo United writes:

We demand improved safety precautions that are not punitive or cause further stress for employees. The solution is not more monitoring, but ensuring that we are all connected to a supportive work environment instead of warehoused away in a back office.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/27/sharpen-your-blades-boys/#disciplinary-technology

[1doesnotsimplyhavejust1fandam]

This has most definitely been said before, but we were robbed of the core four quarantining on-screen together at Buck’s place. ROBBED I say

[icantalk710]

Looong day of catching up on emails and work to set myself up to be (mostly) on vacation as of xmas 😩☕😵‍💫

[hummingjay]

HAHAA NEW OCS!!!!!

Cicada and her Handler Nova!

[caterpillarinacave]

Using the computer as a babysitter for Jed and Octavius is all fun and games until they figure out how to use Larry’s credit card

[ryngtail]

so cruel to wake up with a tummy ache and still have to clock in to my day job.

during PRRIIIDEE??

Cruel......cruel..

[gemmasdeadwife]

Pre-post disclaimer that I’m absolutely not someone who ships either markgemma or markhelly to the exclusion of the other, or wants one out of the way. I hate that shit and both relationships are extremely important. I do like to speculate about them without that burden of being pressured to pick one and shit on the other.

A lot of people are talking about how Mark and Gemma are now too different for their marriage to ever work again. Which is totally valid and makes sense, and something I’ve thought about a lot myself. It’s such a normal, everyday tragedy for relationships to be broken by trauma, distance, change. But… what if it’s actually the opposite…?

Which I know is a mega fucked thing to say about endless torture! But idk… I think for Mark it could put their struggles with infertility into perspective. Obviously that was huge and traumatic, but maybe there was no need for it to eclipse their marriage- there was so much more to it than that. And I think he’s learning (VERY SLOWLY) to confront his obstacles head-on instead of running away and lashing out at his loved ones. I think it would be hard for him to ever take her for granted again, and if he started to slip that way, it wouldn’t take a lot of reminding for him to shape up.

Gemma of course didn’t really need to change- that’s the bigger part of the problem here to me. Maybe she was a little naïve for getting into the Lumon stuff that she did, but how could she have possibly known? She was just analyzing interesting little puzzles, a welcome distraction from feeling so hopeless. If she did display any naïveté, I think there’s pretty much zero chance of that ever cropping up again after what she’s been through.

The biggest issues still are the trauma and how much they’ve each changed. Is their trauma around each other, and their pedestalization of each other while they were apart, too great for them to have a relationship again? I think it could go either way. For one thing, the trauma is going to be difficult with all of their relationships going forward, including Mark and Helly too. I don’t believe that the deeply traumatized can’t love properly- it just takes a fuckton of work.

Changing over time is also a problem in any long term relationship, though it’s harder when you’re not together through the change, and this is more unusual and fucked up than being apart during a deployment or something. I think they will have to get to know each other all over again very carefully, gently and gradually. It’s natural if there are some missteps along the way. They aren’t the same people they were before the “death,” and they aren’t the idolized versions of each other they pined over through separation, either. And that will either result in falling in love in a whole new way, or else realizing romance doesn’t make sense between them anymore, but remaining family- I think that bond between them is too strong to become nothing, but it could transform.

[notbecauseofvictories]

I won't make any grand, sweeping statements about it, but I do think taking public transit has and continues to make me a better person than I would be otherwise.

[airborneice]

“What’s this one supposed to mean?”

“Hmm..beauty or strength, sometimes.”

“Perfect.”

@sketchbookweek Day 2 - Wilderness / Witchcraft

going back to my roots of drawing sketchbook being gay in a field

[mewkwota]

Trevor got a new-n-pretty outfit for Sypha, and it only cost his literal blood, sweat, and tears. I did make a few creative liberties on this iteration of Sypha's design since I want to keep her very snug-looking, so I made a lot of the parts to her dress longer and poofed up the sleeves just so they match her descendants. :D

[babacontainsmultitudes]

Ough guys I'm hopping on the train in less than 2 days to move to a new city this is sooo fucked up what do you meannnn

[slayerdurge]

ok this is the first i'm finding out that durge has a little corpse-looking goblinoid weirdo butler who shows up and brings gifts as rewards for murder. i love him.

[thus-spoke-lo]

Pokes my head in and waves hello and then sneaks out the back door again

[wardensantoineandevka]

I love even the negative reviews have just convinced me that I'm gonna personally enjoy Veilguard

[smokbeast]

I RETURN, I am all settled and good to go in my new home for now! Ill be posting sillies again this week n be reopening comms again but not ych yet as my pc is not with me currently, BUT I am able to do any of my other options happily and will even post new adopts this week and a new commission option ^^