Is watching Attorneys All Day Good For Mental Health? HMM

Is it crazy for contract attorneys to work under constant video surveillance? I thank Flo Nicolas and the Washington post for drawing more attention to this than I’ve been able to with my own personal experience… but please, let me elaborate on HOW crazy it is. 

First of all, they don’t need it for any of the security reasons that they say they do.

This video surveillance is added security to the measures they already have in place making any misconduct they’re “trying to protect against” utterly impossible. They already count metrics, key strokes, mouse clicks, don’t give us real email addresses so we couldn’t email a document to ourselves if we wanted to, we can’t print anything if we wanted to, we cannot move the documents outside of their secure program OR their secure online “electronic workplace environment.” 

We cannot save files onto the work laptop even when we need those documents for work every day. We have to have them emailed to us on our internal email accounts and scroll down to those emails every day to retrieve them. The work desktops and folders are wiped regularly, remotely, while they watch us probably.

They can tell if we’ve been “idle” too long in their program and we will be marked negatively for that, even if the idle conduct is by their own instruction (if they gave you work outside of the program) or if you’re “idly” reading 800 page documents. They penalize first and ask later if at all. 

We have mandatory phone calls every day with the team; they don’t tell us until the day of, MAYBE the day before if we’re lucky, what time those calls will take place, so you can’t plan ANYTHING in terms of what time you’ll take a break (if at all). During those calls, we often discuss nothing – the purpose is to take attendance twice a day on random occasions to EVEN FURTHER make sure that our asses are exactly in our seats. 

The programs we use are set to turn on and off (in terms of access) every day, so you have to be logged in during the assigned, core hours and can’t make up for hours without special permission (only usually granted when they already need extra help anyway) to work outside of the core hours. They “need you” there at specific core hours, they say, because that’s when they collect the metrics about every move you make and every second of work you do and do not complete in a given hour to provide to the client. 

I once notified them I had a doctor’s appointment and that I’d dial into the daily call on my way back from it if I was not home and back online yet. This of course was after they advised the time of our daily calls and one was during my doctor’s appointment and I couldn’t change it because of them (AGAIN). The call was a half hour and I did dial in on the way back and emailed them from my personal email account letting them know I was on the call. They wrote back saying thanks. But we’re just forgettable numbers, not humans, so when it came time to look at time, billing and payroll, they dinged me via email for the “extra” half hour because they determined I wasn’t logged in during that time. 

All of this is before the electronic surveillance comes into play.

The instructions for setting up the computer and remote environment are like nothing I’ve seen before. I don’t purchase anything as expensive as this software likely is. We are required to set up the remote environment before we can access ANY aspect of work – heads up — if you’re on unemployment, they’ll make you do this on a non-work day and in states that haven’t adopted partial unemployment, the less than half hour (unless there are tech difficulties that are their fault – its their laptop and technology) – is counted against you for a full day of work. Even though you’re paid $20-$30 an hour.

You make an appointment with IT. No need to confirm with them that you’re ready and in front of the screen – they already know the second you’ve OPENED THE LAPTOP, even before completing the camera setup. They have you position your face in SO many different ways – it’s a lot more than setting up an iPhone face recognition, for example. They then compare that against the two forms of ID they have you provide to make sure your real face matches your government face. 

Then, anytime you want access to your work and ability to DO your work, you’re on camera. It’s not “invasive,” visually, but there is a “YOU ARE BEING RECORDED!” constant message and a camera bordered around your screen with a small window (like in a zoom or FaceTime) with your face to clarify that yes, they’re watching. 

If you lift your arms the wrong way, the screen turns black and you can’t access anything until the camera confirms that you, and only you are in the room, and you’re in fact staring at the computer in the attentive way you should be. You can’t get back in until it’s SURE no cell phone camera is nearby, and it mistakes coffee cups, water bottles, and all sorts of other stuff for phones constantly throughout the day. 

Careful not to take too much time getting back into the secure environment, or instead of resuming, you have to start the whole Face ID process again and log all the way back into the computer, and if you’re logged out for too long, that’s your money, not theirs. 

And that’s all before I get into the unbelievable damage this can cause in terms of mental health and wellbeing. I’ve written to authorities in the legal field at length, describing these impacts, providing the necessary personal information about myself and assuring them that many other attorneys feel the same or worse about all of this. 

But here we still are.