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Comment by manuelmoreale | Hacker News Reader

Not arguing against your points but I'm wondering if this is more a US related issue? I never heard this being a thing here in the EU but maybe it's just me being unaware of all the various situations. I don't know anyone who works from home (whether in tech and in other sectors) that has to deal with all that nonsense.

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Germany reporting in, couldn't see that becoming a thing here. I have about 99% wfh currently, and if my employer would try to implement something like that, the union would probably not even have time to get involved because the works council ("Betriebsrat", not sure if that's a good translation) would swat it down instantly.

It sounds insane, but believable for the US (but that might be my bias showing, I've always heard bad things about worker's rights in the US).

Yeah I’m in Italy and I don’t know anyone who’s dealing with all that nonsense that’s why I was wondering if this is a US thing.

The fact that you have a Betriebsrat along with strong unions is why that sort of thing doesn't happen. Many European countries have works councils with a similar union-adjacent role. I'm not aware of an equivalent in the USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council

I have a friend in the UK (and this was a few years ago when it was still part of the EU) who worked for a company that had always-on screen monitoring installed on company computers and their boss would randomly remotely view people's screens to check on what they were doing throughout the day.

That may not have been legal, but it was certainly happening.

GDPR prevents most of this. There are rules about email snooping, for example: https://www.edps.europa.eu/data-protection/data-protection/r...

(presumably someone will be along to say that this is the EU destroying businesses by not allowing them 100% power over the lives of their employees)

I had never heard of this in the US until now, either. But I also don't work in a factory or warehouse, and don't know anyone who does.

The US has significantly less privacy in general than most of the EU. The way the whole freedom thing is implemented tends to skew heavily towards "businesses can do whatever they think makes the most profit".

American here, this feels very uniquely “American Capitalist” to me

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