May 9, 2020 - David Icke
11:05
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| 🎵Soul Eater OST- The Last of Us🎵 🎵Soul Eater OST- The Last of Us🎵 | |
| From the business section of the Wall Street Journal, welcome back to the office! | |
| Your every move will be watched by Conrad Putzier and Chip Cutter. | |
| Many Americans heading back to the factory and the office as the coronavirus pandemic eases will soon begin to notice that their every move is being watched or recorded. | |
| In midtown Manhattan, thermal cameras will measure body temperatures as employees file into a 32-story office tower at Rockefeller Center. | |
| The building's owner, RXR Realty, said it is also developing a mobile app for tenants to monitor, and score, how closely their workers are complying with social distancing. | |
| PricewaterhouseCoopersLLP said it is preparing to launch this month a phone app for employers that traces contacts by analyzing workers' interactions in the office. | |
| More than 50 clients have expressed interest, including some of the nation's biggest banks, manufacturers, and energy companies. | |
| Advertising giant Interpublic Group of Companies is exploring dividing its 22,000 U.S. employees into three separate groups, according to perceived health risks, which could include age. | |
| Workers could be asked to disclose medical and other personal information about themselves and, in some cases, family members. | |
| Interpublic hasn't signed off on the system yet, but it's definitely on the front burner," said | |
| Eric Osman, chief medical officer at the medical advisory firm Vigilant Protective Health Services, | |
| which is advising Interpublic. Interpublic said it has only begun preliminary discussions about | |
| the system. It is a reasonable approach if you can get through the operational and some of the | |
| privacy and regulatory issues, Dr. Osman said. Many office workers have become used to widespread | |
| security cameras and key cards that register entries and exits. After the September 11 | |
| terrorist attacks, buildings installed enhanced security measures, including logging in visitors | |
| and X-raying briefcases. The arrival of COVID-19 is taking surveillance to a higher level, | |
| with some employers planning to track movements and gather personal information like never before | |
| in Western democracies. | |
| It marks a new chapter in the debate over privacy and the trade-offs people are willing to make for safety. | |
| Some companies now see the measures as perhaps the only way to reopen offices without risking a spike in infections, at least until a vaccine becomes available. | |
| Building owners said the systems, similar to measures used in China that helped slow the spread of the virus, promote health and safety so that employers can better monitor and enforce separation between workers and quickly determine which employees could have come in contact with an infected colleague. | |
| The pandemic's consequences are far reaching. | |
| And it is going to change the way all these places work, said Amil Sarva, chief executive of flexible office company Notel, which is adding features to its app that would allow its customers to track the movements of employees. | |
| When you design a workplace, it's no longer going to be like, hey, is it cool and fun for my people? | |
| A major criterion is going to be, is this place safe and resilient? | |
| Massachusetts-based healthcare software company Athena Health, Inc., We trust our employees, said Fran Lawler, Athena Health's chief human resources officer. | |
| I think our employees would feel like that is a bit invasive. | |
| Jason M. Schultz, professor of clinical law at New York University, who studies workplace monitoring, predicted the tools might remain after the pandemic. | |
| Employers don't really have any incentives to remove surveillance once they install it, he said. | |
| When companies began sending their employees home in March, they focused on keeping productivity high despite the remote setups. | |
| In anticipation of workers returning to offices, some added basic precautions, such as extra cleaning, markers on the ground to direct foot traffic, and more space between desks. | |
| Some planned to reduce overall numbers present by keeping some staff working at home or staggering shifts, and others planned to set up their own testing. | |
| Other companies said these moves don't go far enough. | |
| RXR, the real estate company, is testing new systems on its own employees. | |
| We are using ourselves as the guinea pigs, RXR's chief executive Scott Reckler said. | |
| The company is aiming to have its social distancing app ready at the end of the month. | |
| Workers' movements are tracked through their smartphones. | |
| You get a higher score the more time in the office you are farther than six feet from another person. | |
| An individual would see his or her own score And the employer would see aggregate data on how employees are complying with social distancing as a whole. | |
| After the pandemic, RXR said the technology could be used to ensure the most efficient use of space and the overall wellness of our customers. | |
| Interpublic, whose ad agencies employ 9,700 people in New York City, began to think about how to safely bring back staffers in early April. | |
| After consultation with Dr. | |
| Osman, The company is exploring options, including a system of classifying its U.S. employees in one of three levels. | |
| A worker that tested positive for coronavirus antibodies, indicating they had the infection in the past, would be considered a level one employee, the lowest risk, and could return to work when states and cities lift work-from-home orders. | |
| Those without antibodies but who are considered a low to moderate risk would count as Level 2. | |
| This group would include employees who are under 65 years old, don't live with high-risk people, and don't have chronic diseases including diabetes or hypertension. | |
| This group could potentially return to work in a second wave. | |
| Employees over 65 or those who are pregnant, smoke, have chronic diseases or health issues would be considered Level 3. | |
| These at-risk employees would have to wait the longest to return. | |
| Dr. Osman has also advised Interpublic that there are shortcomings with COVID-19 antibody testing, including that some tests falsely show people have antibodies to the virus. | |
| Other companies have expressed interest in contact tracing tools So they can pinpoint which employees may have been exposed to the virus without needing to shut down entire floors of an office or individual manufacturing plants, said Tom Putiamatam, digital products leader at PWC. He said he and his colleagues host about 15 meetings a day with current and potential clients to explain the company's new tracing app. | |
| The product, installed on an employee's phone, uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi data, along with other signals, to determine employees' proximity to each other within a company building. | |
| It doesn't track someone's location or analyze data outside of work, Mr. | |
| Puti Yamadam said. If an employee tests positive for the coronavirus, HR administrators can log into a web portal to determine which other employees may be at high risk or medium risk based on their proximity to that worker in a given time period. | |
| Companies are also doing more to screen arrivals and prevent sick people from entering buildings in the first place. | |
| Whether to send a daily questionnaire to workers early every morning, We're good to go. | |
| Those feeling ill would be reminded to stay home, while employees who respond in a satisfactory way could be given a code to scan in an office lobby to gain entry. | |
| Access management company Okta Inc. | |
| might require employees who want to work in one of their 12 global offices to register a day in advance and go through a health and safety check that includes questions about their temperature and other potential symptoms, according to the company's senior vice president of global workplace services, Armin Vartanian. Fever, a thermal imaging device developed by X-Labs, said it is launching a pre-check option loosely modeled on the Transportation Security Administration's pre-check system at airports. | |
| The goal is to reduce lines at buildings of people waiting to have their temperatures checked. | |
| Employees can log into Fever's app at home every morning through a facial scan and take their temperature with a digital thermometer. | |
| The app sends the temperature to the employer with a timestamp. | |
| If it is below the fever threshold, the employee gets a pass for the day. | |
| Envoys Mr. Gadius said many employers plan to ask guests if they are experiencing symptoms of COVID-19 and how they got to the office. | |
| Public transit is viewed as riskier than private cars. | |
| There are still few agreed-upon standards on what tools are effective and how they should be used while respecting individual privacy, said Stephen Feldstein, an associate professor at Boise State University who studies digital surveillance. | |
| We're in a bit of a Wild West, he said. | |
| In the absence of federal guidelines in the U.S. or other even kind of less explicit formal regulations, but just norms, it's a little bit of a free-for-all right now in terms of who's doing what. | |
| Some employees might push back on contact tracing efforts, perhaps by turning off their phones when meeting with people, NYU's Mr. | |
| Schultz said. Employers should clarify to workers what will likely happen if they are forced to self-quarantine or take time away from the office, he said. | |
| Existing employment laws that protect against discrimination by age or disability still apply in a pandemic. | |
| And asking all employees to disclose health information could open a company to legal liability, said Jennifer Merrigan Fay, an employment law partner at Goodwin Proctor LLP. Companies have some additional leeway in a pandemic, she said. | |
| The White House's return-to-work guidelines call for employers to make accommodations for vulnerable workers. | |
| Including those who are elderly or with serious underlying health conditions. | |
| Such an accommodation could include allowing people to continue doing their jobs from home. | |
| If employers are telling people that they cannot come back to work or that they have to disclose information if they are asymptomatic about their health, I think that you'll absolutely see challenges to that, Ms. | |
| Merrigan Fay said. At his building in Rockefeller Center, RxR's Mr. |
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