Jason Edward Harrington spent six years working the luggage-screening checkpoint at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago.

杰森·爱德华·哈灵顿花了六年时间在芝加哥奥黑尔国际机场的行李安检站工作。

A college graduate and freelance writer, he initially took the job as a stopgap, but found that he enjoyed meeting passengers from all over the world, some of whom showed a real interest in him.

作为一名大学毕业生和自由撰稿人，他最初将这份工作作为权宜之计，但发现他喜欢结识来自世界各地的乘客，其中一些人对他表现出真正的兴趣。

But while working for the TSA, Harrington noticed that his bosses were following and video-recording his every move, a practice they said was at least in part for his protection: If, perchance, a traveler’s iPad went missing, the videotapes would prove that Harrington was not to blame. Harrington was on board with that.

但在为TSA工作时，哈灵顿注意到他的老板正在跟踪并录像他的一举一动，他们说这种做法至少部分是为了保护他：如果旅行者的iPad丢失了，录像带将证明哈灵顿不应该受到责备。哈灵顿对此表示赞同。

His problem, he told me, was that supervisors would also view the tapes to search for the slightest infraction—anything from gum chewing to unauthorized trips to the bathroom.

他告诉我，他的问题是，主管也会查看录像带，以寻找最轻微的违规行为——从咀嚼口香糖到未经授权的洗手间。

Eventually, these intrusions led him to quit. “If they trusted us, respected us, you could really enjoy the job,” Harrington told me. “But they didn’t.”

最终，这些入侵导致他退出。“如果他们信任我们，尊重我们，你真的可以享受这份工作，”哈灵顿告诉我。“可是他们没有。”

A TSA spokesman, Michael McCarthy, acknowledged the agency’s use of surveillance, though he attributed the “fairly rapid” turnover rate of TSA baggage screeners to other factors—in particular, to “low pay and high stress.”

TSA发言人迈克尔·麦卡锡（Michael McCarthy）承认该机构使用了监控，尽管他将TSA行李安检员的“相当快速”的流动率归因于其他因素 - 特别是“低工资和高压力”。

In fact, electronic surveillance of employees, through technologies including not just video cameras but also monitoring software, has grown rapidly across all industries.

事实上，通过包括摄像机和监控软件在内的技术，对员工的电子监控在所有行业中都迅速发展。

Randolph Lewis, a professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Under Surveillance: Being Watched in Modern America, pointed to software that makes it possible for employers to monitor employee facial expressions and tone of voice to gauge their emotional states, such as rage or frustration.

德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校（University of Texas at Austin）美国研究教授、《监视之下：在现代美国被监视》（Under Surveillance： Being Watchin Modern America）一书的作者伦道夫·刘易斯（Randolph Lewis）指出，软件使雇主能够监控员工的面部表情和语气，以衡量他们的情绪状态，如愤怒或沮丧。

Among more conventional surveillance methods, employers can track employees’ website visits and keep tabs on their employees’ keystrokes.

在更传统的监控方法中，雇主可以跟踪员工的网站访问并密切关注员工的击键。

Employers can also monitor employees’ personal blogs and read their social-networking profiles.

雇主还可以监控员工的个人博客并阅读他们的社交网络资料。

In one case in California, a sales executive at a money-transfer firm sued her employer, claiming she had been fired for disabling an app that used employer-issued cell phones to track workers via GPS, even when they were off the clock. (The suit was later settled out of court.)

在加利福尼亚州的一个案例中，一家汇款公司的一名销售主管起诉她的雇主，声称她因禁用一款使用雇主发放的手机通过GPS跟踪工人的应用程序而被解雇，即使他们下班了。（这起诉讼后来在庭外和解。）

The proliferation of surveillance is due, at least in part, to the rising sophistication and declining cost of spy technology: Employers monitor workers because they can.

监控的激增至少部分是由于间谍技术的日益复杂和成本下降：雇主监控工人是因为他们可以。

Michel Anteby, a Boston University sociologist and business scholar who has watched how monitoring affects employees at the TSA and other workplaces, has also noticed that the more employees are watched, the harder they try to avoid being watched, and the harder management tries to watch them.

波士顿大学社会学家和商业学者米歇尔·安特比（Michel Anteby）观察了监控如何影响TSA和其他工作场所的员工，他也注意到，员工被监视的次数越多，他们就越努力避免被监视，管理层也就越努力地监视他们。

“Most TSA workers we observed do everything possible to stay under the radar, to essentially disappear,” he said. “They try to never speak up, never stick out, do nothing that might get noticed by management. This leads to a vicious cycle, whereby management grows more suspicious and feels justified in ratcheting up the surveillance.”

“我们观察到的大多数TSA工作人员都尽一切可能保持低调，基本上消失，”他说。“他们试图从不说出来，从不伸出援手，不做任何可能被管理层注意到的事情。这导致了一个恶性循环，管理层变得更加怀疑，并认为有理由加强监控。

Perhaps the most common argument for surveillance—one often deployed by firms that make employee-monitoring products—is that it can make workers more productive.

也许监控最常见的论点——制造员工监控产品的公司经常采用的监控——是它可以提高员工的工作效率。

Purveyors of monitoring software claim they can help managers reduce the number of wasted hours and ensure that employees make better use of their time.

监控软件的供应商声称他们可以帮助管理人员减少浪费的时间，并确保员工更好地利用他们的时间。

A Boston-based technology company called Humanyze applies what it calls “moneyball for business.”

一家名为Humanyze的波士顿科技公司应用了所谓的“商业钱球”。

The term moneyball originated in Michael Lewis’s best seller about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its general manager, Billy Beane, who used statistics to assemble a team of particularly gifted ballplayers.

金钱球一词起源于迈克尔·刘易斯（Michael Lewis）关于奥克兰田径棒球队及其总经理比利·比恩（Billy Beane）的畅销书，他使用统计数据组建了一支由特别有天赋的球员组成的球队。

Humanyze gathers data by fitting employee ID badges with a microphone, location sensors, and an accelerometer to tease out patterns of employee behavior that affect a company’s performance.

Humanyze 通过为员工 ID 徽章安装麦克风、位置传感器和加速度计来收集数据，以梳理出影响公司绩效的员工行为模式。

At one office, Humanyze’s data suggested that more frequent employee interactions improve productivity, so the employer installed larger, more central coffee stations to encourage those interactions.

在一个办公室，Humanyze的数据表明，更频繁的员工互动可以提高生产力，因此雇主安装了更大，更中心的咖啡站来鼓励这些互动。

In his essay “In Praise of Electronically Monitoring Employees,” the MIT researcher Andrew McAfee describes a study of surveillance he conducted in collaboration with colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis and Brigham Young University.

麻省理工学院研究员安德鲁·迈克菲（Andrew McAfee）在他的文章《赞美电子监控员工》中描述了他与圣路易斯华盛顿大学和杨百翰大学的同事合作进行的一项监控研究。

Using theft-detection software, the researchers monitored waitstaff (with their knowledge) at 392 casual-dining restaurants in the United States.

使用盗窃检测软件，研究人员监测了美国392家休闲餐厅的服务员（在他们的知情下）。

The installation of the software correlated with a reduction in employee theft by less than $25 a week for each location—not a whole lot. What was significant was that revenue grew by $2,975 a week per location—nearly $1,000 from drink orders alone.

安装该软件后，每个地点的员工盗窃每周减少不到 25 美元，而不是很多。重要的是，每个地点的收入每周增长 2，975 美元，仅饮料订单就增长了近 1，000 美元。

Employee’s tips also grew, and this, McAfee writes, suggests a “win-win.” He speculates, “As far as we can tell, performance improved simply because people started doing their jobs better.”

员工的小费也在增长，McAfee写道，这表明了“双赢”。他推测，“据我们所知，绩效的提高仅仅是因为人们开始更好地完成工作。

Perhaps once the “bad actors” understood they were being watched, they realized their best bet for making more money was to improve their service in the hope of garnering larger tips, McAfee surmises—and that good behavior caught on among other employees, too. （caught on 变得流行）

也许一旦“坏人”明白他们被监视了，他们意识到他们赚更多钱的最佳选择是改善他们的服务，希望获得更大的小费，迈克菲推测 - 并且这种良好的行为在其他员工中也流行起来。

The proposition that job performance improves when employees are monitored, and thereby theoretically deprived of the opportunity to steal, is not a hopeful one.

当员工受到监控时，工作绩效会提高，从而在理论上被剥夺偷窃的机会，这种主张并不是一个有希望的主张。

An equally plausible explanation for the growth in revenue at the restaurants McAfee observed is that installing spy software was part of a larger commitment on the part of management to organize and streamline operations.

McAfee观察到的餐厅收入增长的一个同样合理的解释是，安装间谍软件是管理层组织和简化运营的更大承诺的一部分。

Anteby notes, “It’s possible that almost any change—even changing the lighting—would have prompted a similar increase in productivity.” It’s also possible that observed employees felt pressured to push customers to order more—a practice that is not necessarily good for business in the long run, as few of us enjoy feeling pressured to overconsume.

Anteby指出，“几乎任何变化——甚至改变照明——都有可能促使生产力的类似提高。也有可能观察到的员工感到有压力，要推动客户订购更多订单——从长远来看，这种做法不一定对企业有利，因为我们中很少有人喜欢过度消费的压力。

In general, studies of surveillance suggest that it can increase workplace stress, promote worker alienation, lower job satisfaction, and convey the perception that the quantity of work one generates is more important than its quality.

一般来说，对监控的研究表明，它可以增加工作场所的压力，促进工人疏远，降低工作满意度，并传达一个人产生的工作量比质量更重要的看法。

In an analysis aptly titled “Watching Me Watching You,” the British anthropologists Michael Fischer and Sally Applin conclude that workplace surveillance creates “a culture where … people more often alter their behavior to suit machines and work with them, rather than the other way around,” and that this tends to erode their sense of “agency.”

英国人类学家迈克尔·费舍尔（Michael Fischer）和莎莉·阿普林（Sally Applin）在一篇题为“看着我看着你”的分析中得出结论，工作场所的监控创造了“一种文化......人们更经常地改变他们的行为以适应机器并与他们一起工作，而不是相反“，这往往会侵蚀他们的”代理感”。

That is, the constant surveillance of employees diminishes their capacity to operate as independent thinkers and actors.

也就是说，对员工的持续监视削弱了他们作为独立思考者和行动者运作的能力。

Worse yet, some studies suggest that workers who sense they are monitored have lower self-esteem and are actually less productive.

更糟糕的是，一些研究表明，那些感到自己受到监控的工人自尊心较低，实际上生产力较低。

In fact, Anteby told me, those of us who do “cheat” on the job often do so in retaliation for the very lack of trust surveillance implies: For example, some TSA employees he observed wasted countless hours finding clever ways to evade the surveillance camera’s roving eye.

事实上，安特比告诉我，我们这些在工作中“作弊”的人经常这样做，以报复缺乏信任的监控意味着：例如，他观察到的一些TSA员工浪费了无数个小时，寻找聪明的方法来躲避监控摄像头的漫游眼。

So while surveillance can be beneficial under some conditions, it’s unclear precisely what those conditions might be—or whether there are limits.

因此，虽然监测在某些情况下可能是有益的，但目前还不清楚这些条件可能是什么，或者是否有限制。