interesting. I think I am probably misunderstanding... someone else wrote me off list and said this:
>anonymous: Aids employers logging compliance with US DOT regs; hours of
>service etc.
?
i dated a trucker a few years ago. On nights he was supposed to see me, he would want to get off early so he drove faster than regs allowed. He'd get in trouble simply because they could tell through one system or another that he'd pulled in before he was supposed to. no computers were involved -- at least not in the cab, though they surely used computers in some fashion in the mid 90s, just in the backend office.
Way long ago, when I worked a truck stop, truckers regularly got busted simply by an analysis of their toll booth tickets. if they drove too fast, you could tell by how long it took to travel toll road. that was just a time stamp pressed on a card, mechanically.
with computers, then, is it that there's very little wiggle room to get away with crap? that you can calculate down to the minute details?
for instance, years ago, a waitress could regularly pocket one or two checks to supplement her tip income. that is, if a customer left the check on the table with the money to cover it the check plus tip, she'd pocket it instead of cashing it out. back in the day, every waitress would pocket $20-30 extra bucks a day this way. Now that computers are around, you (theoretically) can't do this because every single ticket is logged via computer. I can remember when they came in to sell those computers to my boss. he told them to get lost because he didn't appreciate the argument from the sales rep, which presumed a wait staff that were thieves. In his view, it was better to run a business assuming people weren't thieves.
but, of course, (and likely wholly unrelated to h&n), I totally love the story of resistance to that which emerges. Where resistance in the form of ripping of the employer was once individual level, with computers it has had to move to the group and organizational level, to wit:
The thing about computers as a form of social control is that people are still getting away with ripping off their employers at restaurants. Instead of waitresses doing it individually, and then passing along the knowledge to one another on the down-low, as part of your "training", you are now simply recruited into a rip off of the system where the entire crew of employees, from, say, ass manager on down, works together in order to rip off their employer.
using various methods of communication, a fast food cashier will call an order without entering it into the computer. food gets cooked and served, money taken, without registering it. At the end of the evening, ass manager counts out the extra cash and splits it up between entire crew.
My son has a friend who fired recently -- worked for a chain vision center in a mall. There was recently a huge bust among a bunch of stores in Florida: the entire crew was ripping off the insurance industry by filing claims that were for more than the customer actually needed. Not sure of the details, but the interesting thing, to me, was that it wasn't individual level theft, but socially organized theft that required communication among employees and, in fact, a kind of informal training in how to do it correctly. Though that's been going on for years in retail, so nothing new really. At any rate, it was organized theft that emerged as a work around to the attempt to use computers for social control in the workplace.
shag