Employee Monitoring
At my Father’s workplace, an employee was visiting questionable websites during work hours. This man got a virus on his computer, and valuable information about the company was stored on this computer. All of this information was lost. After this incident, the company introduced a new policy where all online activity would be monitored. Management would be able to check all the websites an employee visited in a day. Is this invasion of privacy or a necessary step to protect the company? I worked at this company this summer as an intern. I felt like my privacy was a little bit invaded, what if I needed to visit WebMD or another website of the source? I would not want management knowing any personal medical problems. Additionally, I felt like I could not even check my non-company email account for fear I would get in trouble. Base says that “workers complain that such constant, detailed surveillance diminishes their sense of dignity independence and destroys confidence”. I would have to agree. I know that the work place is meant for work, but sometimes you have downtime, or simply need a ten minute break to do your own break. I do not think that workers should feel guilty or fearful for doing these things. That said, some monitoring is necessary. I think that as long as the workers are getting everything they need to do done they should not be monitored. Workers should have to earn the trust of the company, and if they are proved competent then they should not be monitored.

Why Economic Democracy will never work

Economic Democracy sounds like a brilliant plan that would be a legitimate alternative to capitalism. It solves a lot of the problems capitalism simply ignores. Although economic democracy itself is not perfect, its overall problems seem to be less serious than capitalism. However, this economic system will never be implemented because the people in power will never allow it. The people in power have been put in that position by the capitalist system. Why would they replace a system that has allowed them to succeed? It is a vicious circle. The current system prohibits the transition to a better system. Capitalism is indeed a monster that is impossible to escape. There would have to be some sort of revolution, where the people mistreated under capitalism would band together to implement this new system. However the sad fact remains that many of the underpaid and mistreated workers that would lead this revolution are not educated enough. They are not educated enough to create a revolution, nor are they educated enough to manage themselves if economic democracy was ever implemented. Again they are trapped by the current system. The fact remains that the people in power are too greedy to give up their spoils for the good of the country. It seems like now, when our economy is in such trouble would be the perfect time for change. It is obvious that the current system has failed. However the people in power are still being benefited by capitalism while the rest of us struggle to get by.

Modern times and Braverman

When watching the Modern Times video its easy to understand what that particular company wants, and since this piece sums up the corporate world one could say this video represents our economy, right? In my opinion the video is harsh on what Braverman points out as the fundamental principle of capitalism, that is division of labor. If work were like this then I honestly do not know what could be worse. If the boy cannot get his work done the head guy who sits in his desk chair in a big office orders the production line to go faster which creates bad tweaks in a percentage of the products. One might could argue that this reason leads to the extremely short product life expectancy. Also the production line and division of labor takes away from creativeness, sanity, and overall happiness in my opinion.

Doing one particular thing on that production line would get very old, very fast in which is visible to us through the boy worker. He tries to escape to get a break but cannot because of the employee monotoring. What is very important in my viewing of the video is how one person sits up in an office chair giving commands while doing nothing but devising plans of how to increase production. One of his plans was creating a machine that allowed workers to eat at their station so there is no need for lunch breaks. This exploiting of the poor should be monitored in some form of fashion because it seems extremely unfair to have what our economy would call a 'credited' person sit in an office while the workers under him make his company and him all the money.

Moving from one to another

When talking in class about how Mcdonalds sales is sometimes taken care of by someone who is thousands of miles away completely blew my mind. Braverman says that this division of labor is the fundamental principle of capitalism. The sales representatives for McDonalds have certain requirements to fulfill in their line of duty. One is clicking a red box on the computer screen in 1.75 seconds or less; also they take one person's order in say New Mexico and while the next person is pulling up, the representative takes another order from someone in Denver, Colorado. If one looks at this situation from a capitalist standpoint they would absolutely love it. The higher up people in Mcdonalds makes a lot of money off this requirement because in the big picture, one customer while the other customer drives up to order can make a lot of profit, especially with a worldwide company such as Mcdonalds. I do not know about this situation personally however I know I have been exploited in a manner than the work I do, pays dividends of more than I completed. Working on a farm my whole life I saw/did plenty 'dirty jobs'. I call this making use of the lower end people in your business with returns of large amounts of cash. I would have to shovel mud into rice levees, clean out beaver dams, and mow/weedeed every day while only recieving five dollars per hour. I know the work I did was worth more than I recieved. I did not complain though which I think a lot of people do to not upset anyone. I am not sure if this is the correct thing to do but how can people complain without fear of losing their jobs? Braverman and his talk of division of labor creates many edges. Indeed it does create more of each good with marginal costs at a minimum since there are skilled workers present. But when thinking of division of labor, what are some other options other than our capitalistic views on making profit which says a lot of our outsourcing and division of labor?

Regulating the Unregulated

Internet is an amazing wonder itself, not only that it is free (all free stuffs are good), it is not owned by anyone, everyone has the right to use it. The problem is that, since its free, who should take care of it? Rather, who could take care of it?

This opened to a new era of criminals, where they can hide and do whatever they want in the cyberspace, since it is not 'regulated'. Based on the well-known "Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace", these criminals are almost untouchable. No governments have sovereign over them.

Hence, codes and laws are created to regulate the unregulated Internet. But to what extend could they cover up in the borderless cyberspace? For instance, China has implemented a system that blocks away pornography from being accessible to their citizen. But, that’s it. Only in China. If some citizen of the republic were to go outside of the border, outside the sovereignty of China, they could easily access pornography again.

So these codes and laws, which have been or would be created to govern the Internet, should be done collectively, enforced by all with equal justice. Then only we could defy those who are using the Internet freely. Freedom is a right everyone deserves, but not to an extant where it disturbs other people's right to freedom. So everyone is free to use the Internet but not to do as they please, like hackers and the likes.

The Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace was created to pass the Telecommunication Act of 1996 in the America. If more declaration such as that is created to surpass the laws, it is disastrous to me, to you, to the community, to our world. Is it that hard to follow the codes, the laws that is made for our own good?

An Economy for the People…

After reaching a consensus, despite the great achievements of capitalism, our economy is based on the exploitation of the weak and poor so that the strong and rich may benefit. People with open minds and hearts can easily recognize these traits on Wall Street (it seems that that exploitation has come back to bite them where it hurts). Up until the reading of Schweikart, no one had really presented an alternative to capitalism. The proposal of economic democracy is an interesting take on how an economy should be structured. Economic democracy proposes that the business of a company is controlled by the workers, that it operate within a market, and that the capital is reinvested back into the society in which the company belongs to. Ideally, this seems almost perfect. No more would CEOs be paid $100 million contracts. No more would corporations neglect, exploit, and abuse their workers for the sake of the shareholders, because there would be no shareholders in this economy. No more would jobs be outsourced because all of the capital remains in the community and is reinvested there. In fact, this may put Lou Dobbs in a tough situation since it would eliminate one of the main topics of his show, job outsourcing. However, we do not live in an ideal world; therefore nothing that man creates can be 100% ideal, although we can still try. For instance, who is to say that the democratic system of the workplace doesn’t turn into a good ‘ole boys system where a select few are able to manipulate the other workers? Or who exactly will enforce that the capital is going to be reinvested in communities? Even more importantly, how does this affect international trade, especially amongst nations that don’t use economic democracy? Also, will the economic democracy lessen the desire of the company to advance in the economy in comparison to the same company under a capitalist system?

In the Defense of Workers

Workers often have a very limited range of choices when it comes to where they want to work. Even in a capitalist economy, a worker’s choice of employment is only bound by the education that that person has achieved. Believing that we are the products of our past and our education, employers seek this as justification to the choice in which their workers make for employment. I believe that they are partially true, and partially wrong. Indeed, no worker should be employed to a position that he/she cannot handle. This not only foolish, but it is also dangerous, depending on the occupation. Another argument for employers is that people who have good jobs have worked hard to obtain those good jobs, in their education and careers. There are holes in this argument. It insinuates that everyone who has occupied a high-level position had deserved it, when we know that there are some cases where people have been hired due to affiliation with another high-level member of a corporation. It also suggests that people with low-wage or entry-level positions are in there situations because they never tried hard enough or were just plain lazy. This line of thinking never takes into account the fact that there are many hard workers who, due to unfortunate circumstances, have not had the opportunity to explore all options. In this society which strongly encourages education, we know that all schools are not created equal, even amongst schools in the same district. Take myself for an example. I came up through the Davidson County (Nashville, TN) school system. I attended MLK Magnet for high school. Along with two other high schools, including the only other academic magnet high school, these were the only high schools to pass the No Child Left Behind requirements.

The technology that violates...

Technology is good for some reason; they accommodate the work done by humans. But, have we ever looked technology as in from the other side? Are they really gives us benefits or are there is more than just that? Let us look beyond that. Without noticing, technology is actually something that described by Joan Greenbaum from her book - Windows on the Workplace as a “device that is specifically designed to fit in with management policies to cut labor costs and speed up the processing of information”.

In the world of Capitalism, all is based on profit-making. Management of some sort of company tends to make decision that in the end makes more profit and as well as violating human rights. In order to make more profit, the management uses more technology. This will eventually cut the cost and speeds the time of production. These are the benefits, right. But the use of technology just increases the work available for the management to give to the workers. When there is more work to do, in order to cut cost, the work are divided by detail.

Worst than that, they are paid less money and their creativity as a human had been violated. What does that mean by that? When people are doing their work the same thing every single day, they can only be expert of such things. Their capacity are not developed much. As a human, we need to develop our capacity. This is what makes us different from the animals. We may not realize this but when we make routine things every day, our life are dull and this will eventually, makes unhappiness. Do you think that this is a right thing to do or do you just don’t care? World has become a monstrous thing today, don’t you think?

Charlie Chaplin Interesting Story of "Modern Times"

When I watch this first part of the video of Charlie Chaplin modern times in the class, it makes me felt very awful. I mean, does this really happen in our world? Why didn’t I see such things in my life? Why does this happening? There are so many questions that pop out of my head. The part one of the video starts with people hustles and bustles to go to work. The writer describes this situation by making it analogous to pigs; people are busy looking for money and neglect their sense of humanity. This is true as in the intro, it is stated that “Modern Times” is a story of industry, of individual enterprise – humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness.

In the video, I would like to highlight that in the presence of technology, in this case, the monitoring camera that is primarily used to monitor the work of the workers, the privacy of the workers are violated. These monitoring are used by the employers to monitor so that the workers do their work to make sure the process going on smooth and there is no barrier to gain profit continuously. We can also see that in order to get more profit, the employer will do whatever it takes by any means. Sometimes they would speed up the process in some section without considering whether the workers will have the bad effects. Bad effects shown in this video is when Charlie passes his work to somebody else, his body eventually still moving according to the work he done before.

In part two of “Modern Times”, we can see another example of the situation where the management would like to do anything to increase the profit by speeding the process. In this case, they do this by using the new technology that is the machine that feed the workers in a systematic way but harms the workers. What happened was that people are forced like robots. They were treated just like robots in order to cut the time consumed so that the production can be increased. At some point in the video, Charlie had a nervous breakdown caused by the detailed work he does although maybe this is unlikely to happen. That’s when I think that Capitalism makes workers life miserable and nothing is crueler than destroying people’s creativity.

Technology Advancement with Capitalism

The Internet created a borderless world.

That never came in the thought of the one who created it, Sir Time Berners-Lee; the advancement of technology could bring so many advancements to human kind. If more people would realize the march of technology, many would take the opportunity to expand them in a positive way, like Capitalism did.

The advancement of technology helped capitalism to be such a powerful system that it can expand anywhere, which brings us to the term of hyper mobility of capitalism. Industrial capitalism does not rooted to a certain place only nowadays, but it followed a certain trend. Capitalism tends to go to third-world, poor countries for cheap materials and labors, well, maybe not materials, but definitely cheap labors.

One could say that those poor countries that invited capitalism to them, for me, it is due to the rapid growth of technology. Internet could be obtained anywhere, so, for example; management in America could easily monitor and get updates from the factory in Jamaica. Microprocessor and microchips are getting smaller and cheaper, cutting the cost of production for capitalist. Thus, they could gain more profit which could be invested in moving into a low labor cost area that would result in lower wage, furthering increasing their profit.

From the movie Life & Debt, the Jamaican workers are paid so low that the profit gained from the products made by them is more than 5 times the labor cost. 5 times! Even my parent does not get yearend bonus 5 times their salary per month.

The bitter part that technology and capitalism brings to a country is that they destroy more than they build. Whenever they detected another country that offers an even lower wage and less regulation, they would quickly transfer there. The factory that used to offer new job to the people suddenly stripped them away. They are more like a locust swarm; migrate from place to place just for their benefit, leaving destruction in their wake.

The Cycle of Poo

In the christmas epsiode of South Park Mr. Hanky finds is son Cornwallis upset because he thinks he is only a piece of crap. Mr. Hanky decides to explain to him how crap is everything in the world. This might go unnoticed by most people however when comparing how Pollan describes the cycle of our corn and how it is used today this South Park episode makes complete sense.
Pollan explains how the corn is affected by how farmers grow corn in today's world. The chemicals that are used on the corn are not safe to be consumed however farmers are spraying their corn with multiple chemicals. If we relate this to the South Park episode of how Mr. Hanky explains to his son Cornwallis that crap is everything then this off the wall comparison makes sense. Incorperate what I said about Pollan's standpoint of how the chemicals are sprayed on the corn to generate more yield which is what farmers want. After the corn has gone to market or is fed to livestock it becomes poo by our digestion process. If we consume the market or the livestock then in turn we have consumed some residue of those chemicals the farmers used. After we digest and poo, it is dumped into the ocean where plankton eat the poo, afterwards small fish eat the plankton. Then a bigger fish comes and eats the small fish which is eaten either by another animal or by us through fishing. If that other animal gets to the fish it will have the residue of the chemicals in some form or fashion and when it poos, the chemicals are being sent into the earth through a long process that involves many different animals or people pooing. I never thought of incorporating poo into Pollan's viewpoint, but after Mr. Hanky gave a detailed description about how poo is everything it makes sense to me.