Right — "dystopian" is when white collar workers and professionals start getting treated like blue collar workers, or when people in the imperial core start getting treated like colonized people.
Dystopian is when leaders exert a frightening level of control and surveillance over ordinary people and it becomes normalized to the extent that you're told that you should shrug it off because "somebody else out there has it worse".
Literally the opposite of what I'm saying. I'm saying people shrug off what's happening to other people because they don't think it will happen to them, while in fact, what's happening to other people is a good preview of what's coming for you.
I think dystopian is when you track workers to a degree that invades their privacy.
For example, if you recorded personal conversations people have on break. This is effectively what happens if you record all audio and video, and possibly the screen, of a work from home device. Not sure blue collar workers have been surveiled using hidden microphones and other such devices, say, 20-30 years ago.
If you are tracking time by "how much time the employee spends in the building" then yes, you need to check when they come and go.
You dont need to do this in jobs where performance is very obvious based on commits and similar metrics, as compared to jobs where possibly your attendance is your job (i.e. you dont produce anything, by "just" protecting something, or surveiling something, etc).
There is a reasonable degree of employee surveilance, such that you can make sure someone does their job.
Most of the stuff in the article absoutely goes beyond that.
I dont think this has ever been about poor vs rich, imperial core vs colony (yikes), or blue collar vs white collar. Its simply that white collar workers may have more ways to see theyre being surveiled (i.e. webcam being on). White collar workers are IMO more likely to be in a position where they know that their livelihood is not at risk by simply speaking out about being surveiled to this degree.
When I hear the phrase "wage theft" I think of all the money stolen from workers not the alleged hours workers are not perfectly productive. People have continued to become more productive over the last 40+ years but have not reaped the rewards of that.
