Speaker 1: It's Monday, May eighteen. I'm Oscar Mirrors from the Daily
Speaker 1: Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is your daily
Speaker 1: coronavirus update. As we begin the cautious approach to get
Speaker 1: back to work at the office, just know that your
Speaker 1: every move will be watched. At some workplaces, thermal cameras
Speaker 1: will measure body temperatures of people walking in. At others,
Speaker 1: apps will trace workers interactions at the office. A concern
Speaker 1: for many is that once these extra measures are put
Speaker 1: in place, they may never go away. Conrad Puts here,
Speaker 1: reporter at the Wall Street Journal, joins us for how
Speaker 1: employers plan on tracking you when you come back. Thanks
Speaker 1: for joining us, Conrad, thanks for having me. I want
Speaker 1: to talk about what it's gonna look like when all
Speaker 1: the states reopen and people start going back to work.
Speaker 1: What it's gonna be like to go back to the office,
Speaker 1: and unfortunately, your every move is gonna be watched. Employers
Speaker 1: are planning a bunch of new tools to measure office interactions,
Speaker 1: track workers health, and with all these types of things,
Speaker 1: there's always a privacy concerns, but there's also those things
Speaker 1: of like, hey, things might seem extreme at first, but
Speaker 1: it could be the new normal and you'll get used
Speaker 1: to it later. So Conrad tell us a little bit
Speaker 1: about what employers are planning to do to get Americans
Speaker 1: back to work safely and healthy. So the big thing
Speaker 1: I think people need to understand is when we go
Speaker 1: back to the office, it's not going to be like before.
Speaker 1: It's going to be completely different in a bunch of
Speaker 1: different ways. So some of the most basic things that
Speaker 1: employers are doing now is just moving chairs around, putting
Speaker 1: more distance between desks, just to make sure that there's
Speaker 1: more social distancing in the office. Companies are cleaning offices
Speaker 1: more intensively. So that's all the basic stuff that the
Speaker 1: companies are doing. Pretty much everyone is doing this, but
Speaker 1: there's a growing number of companies that are going beyond
Speaker 1: that that basically say, if we want employees to be
Speaker 1: really safe when they come back to the office, when
Speaker 1: you do a lot more. And so what some of
Speaker 1: these companies are doing is they're basically including surveillance technology
Speaker 1: into their offices. And the idea is if you track
Speaker 1: people better, if you traffic temperature, you track who they
Speaker 1: interact with, you get a better handle of how a
Speaker 1: virus might be spending the office and you can prevent
Speaker 1: it from spreading to basically keep people safer that way.
Speaker 1: One example, at Rockefeller Center, there's an obviously huge office
Speaker 1: tower there and the building's owner is gonna set up
Speaker 1: thermal cameras so they can measure body temperature as employees
Speaker 1: go in. They're also going to develop some type of
Speaker 1: mobile app to monitor and score how closely workers are
Speaker 1: complying with social distancing. And some of these areas are
Speaker 1: where there might be some problems in there. But there's
Speaker 1: a lot of companies that are considering developing mobile apps.
Speaker 1: That seems to be one of the main players in
Speaker 1: all this, and that's a very controversial thing, right. So
Speaker 1: the idea behind these mobile apps is if you install
Speaker 1: an app in your employees phone that tracks what they
Speaker 1: are at any given time, you kind of get a
Speaker 1: sense of whether they come into contact with someone who's
Speaker 1: maybe infected. So let's say if someone in your office
Speaker 1: gets the virus, you can then go back and look
Speaker 1: at the app and find every single person who is
Speaker 1: in contact with them, and they need to make sure
Speaker 1: that they say at home as well. So that's the idea.
Speaker 1: It's designed to keep people safe, but at the same
Speaker 1: time you're also tracking everyone's move at all times, and
Speaker 1: there are some people who are concerned about this. I
Speaker 1: talked to one company, and as in the House, based
Speaker 1: in Massachusetts, which basically said they think that's going too far.
Speaker 1: They don't want to track every move of their employees.
Speaker 1: They think that would be intrusive. So there is some
Speaker 1: debates going on about that. And thermal cameras is another issue.
Speaker 1: Right companies are not installing thermal cameras and the lobbies
Speaker 1: of office buildings that basically take your temperature from AFAR
Speaker 1: and if you walk in you have a fever, this
Speaker 1: camera might see this, and then the door might stop you. Again.
Speaker 1: It could help keep the workplace safe from any sort
Speaker 1: of infections, but it's also it could arguably kind of invasive,
Speaker 1: and there's other options. There's one company called Interpublic. They're
Speaker 1: toying with the idea of maybe separating their workers into
Speaker 1: three different levels. With all of these things, they're good ideas,
Speaker 1: but you're right, there's a lot of problems that could
Speaker 1: arise out of it, and discrimination things like that that
Speaker 1: could arise of that. But into public they want to
Speaker 1: do like a level one. This is somebody that's tested
Speaker 1: positive for anybodies, so they're very low risk. Level two
Speaker 1: would be somebody that is maybe doesn't have the anybodies,
Speaker 1: but they're moderate to low risk, they're healthy people. And
Speaker 1: then people over sixty five and have underlying health conditions,
Speaker 1: they would be a level three. You know, at that point,
Speaker 1: could you be discriminating against somebody because of their age
Speaker 1: or because of these health conditions, and even having to
Speaker 1: disclose those health conditions could be a problem. So this
Speaker 1: is something that in the public is considering doing that
Speaker 1: having decinatively decided if they want to do this yet,
Speaker 1: but they're very clearly thinking about this. And again the
Speaker 1: rationality is you you only want to have those people
Speaker 1: come back to the office that are really safe and
Speaker 1: that an't is vulnerable to the getting sick, because you
Speaker 1: want to make sure that people are healthy. That's the idea,
Speaker 1: and that's obviously commendable. But the risk here is if
Speaker 1: you basically tell people who have pre existing conditions, who
Speaker 1: are smarter, is that they can't come to the offset
Speaker 1: because they're at risk. The risk here is do you
Speaker 1: discriminate against them? Right if you can't come to the office.
Speaker 1: The that many contact part in meetings is that may
Speaker 1: be bad to your career because you don't get your
Speaker 1: face in front of other people. There is the danger
Speaker 1: that that over the years to come, some people might
Speaker 1: field that they're being discriminated against. And that's the big
Speaker 1: debate that some of these companies will have to have
Speaker 1: is how do you weigh the benefits for more safety
Speaker 1: against the downside of potentially discriminating over someone's health, and
Speaker 1: how do the employers navigate that. You know, the White
Speaker 1: House has in their guidelines calls for employers to make
Speaker 1: accommodations for vulnerable workers things like that, but existing employment
Speaker 1: laws are still in place with regards to discrimination and
Speaker 1: all that, so that's gonna be a tough thing for
Speaker 1: them to navigate. And sorry to say, but they'll probably
Speaker 1: be some lawsuits and things like that as soon as
Speaker 1: people really start getting back into the workforce. The new
Speaker 1: area for companies to navigate, and one expert described this
Speaker 1: is sort of the wild West, right, because we've never
Speaker 1: lived to a time like this in a hundred years
Speaker 1: where there is this pentanic go back to the office.
Speaker 1: So companies often they're experimenting with a bunch of different things.
Speaker 1: They're trying to figure out what works and also companies
Speaker 1: are waiting for clear guidelines from lawmakers from governments before
Speaker 1: they decent, if you decide what they want to do.
Speaker 1: But I think everyone said is confused right now. A
Speaker 1: lot of companies to try and figure out what to do,
Speaker 1: and we'll know a lot more than in a few
Speaker 1: months to come. Yeah, one of the biggest concerns about
Speaker 1: all of this is, let's say you put some of
Speaker 1: these things in place because of the pandemic, and once
Speaker 1: things kind of slowed down with that, those things are
Speaker 1: already in place, you're just gonna kind of have to
Speaker 1: live with them. And there's a lot of parallels to
Speaker 1: you know, what happened in September eleven, after buildings install
Speaker 1: these enhanced security measures X rays, a bunch of different
Speaker 1: things like that. There's just kind of these parallels that
Speaker 1: while it might seem intrusive and extreme right now, after
Speaker 1: a while you'll get used to it and it will
Speaker 1: be that new normal. Right And all these companies will
Speaker 1: spend a good amount of money investing in all this technology,
Speaker 1: installing all this technology, so they'll have an economic incentive
Speaker 1: to keep it using it. Right, to spend all this money,
Speaker 1: you don't want to just use it for six months
Speaker 1: and then when the pendomeic to go over you in
Speaker 1: the other stamp. So I think the complaint is just
Speaker 1: that this you cannot confront. It means that more companies
Speaker 1: will just keep on permanently doing more surveillance on their
Speaker 1: own workers. And the mind of revenue analogy is very interesting,
Speaker 1: right because in New York City, it was a lot
Speaker 1: easier to go to an office in New York. You
Speaker 1: wouldn't have to go through your tone style, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: have to show your idea to anyone at the front desk.
Speaker 1: And then I haven't happened. End up changed completely and
Speaker 1: you started upslaying people's suitcases and garages, cars would gain
Speaker 1: screen for bombs. So security just got a lot more
Speaker 1: intense and it never really went away. I mean something
Speaker 1: did go away, but but in general security just permanently
Speaker 1: stayed a lot harder, and people got used to it.
Speaker 1: And they think, for better or worse, a lot of
Speaker 1: people will will get used to some of these changes
Speaker 1: that are happening. Law Conrad puts here reporter at the
Speaker 1: Wall Street Journal, thank you very much for joining us,
Speaker 1: thanking him oscar room mirrors and this has been your
Speaker 1: daily coronavirus update, don't forget the effort today's big news stories.
Speaker 1: You can check me out on The Daily Dive podcasts
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