xedos said:
At the point this level of oversight is truly needed , it’s best to just ditch the humans and have robots do the work.
TLDR:
These things are (primarily) NOT oversight. It is so a more senior employee can assist where/as needed as efficiently as possible. If the supervisor would abuse his powers, the team will not work - as to be able to support a colleague there
must be an atmosphere that asking for help is OK and is desirable even for the worker. Otherwise you can never have a good team - thus good results.
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Line manufacturing was introduced about 100 yrs ago and tracking of workers progress is an essential part of it. You cannot separate one from the other. And yes, line manufacturing workers are glorified robots. Which is actual OK - search the root of the robot work => it was derived bu Čapek from "robota" which meant "(mandated) work" in Czech/Slovak at the time.
Also ref. employee protection in EU, you can have cameras, sensors, etc. all over the place IF there is a valid reason for that.
You CANNOT use them to track employees without a reason - e.g. in a office - and you cannot track them where there is no technology-triggered reason like on hallways, cafeteria etc. But you absolutely can at their workstation - as long as you are tracking the work, not employee (i.e. camera pointed at the work table is OK, camera monitoring the whole person/movement can be problematic.
You also cannot use any information about the employee which you acquire via such means for anything else than for the stated purpose of the manufacturing itself. E.g. HR is not allowed to access such data etc. On top, Germans they are pretty "crazy" with these things ref. employee protection.
Germans tend to go over the top like up to recently forbidding to have mobile phone numbers on package being delivered - so it was common the package was not delivered in more complicated places etc. where a phone-in was necessary. etc.
Now I am not defending "tracking people". But when you work in a team of tens/hundreds which MUST work in sync, you cannot simply have the freedom you get in the trades. Synchronization is essential to get the efficiencies these plants get.