American billionaire John Morgan has sparked a debate around work ethics and employee rights after revealing that 23 of his staffers quit when he began tracking their productivity through laptop cameras.
The billionaire attorney made a series of controversial remarks on The Iced Coffee Hour podcast, claiming that most people today shirk away from hard work. Morgan, a politician and attorney from Florida, argued that people want remote work because they want less supervision and accountability.
He claimed to be speaking from personal experience.
“23 people quit”
John Morgan told the Iced Coffee Hour that most people resisted the idea of returning to office after the pandemic. When employees refused to return to the office, he offered them the option to continue working from home, but with strict monitoring.
He said that the company put cameras on their work-from-home laptops.
“You can work from home. But guess what? We're going to put a camera on your computer. We're going to put a camera up your ***. We won't look at you. It'll be a pixel,” he said.
Morgan claimed that 23 employees quit in just seven days.
{{/usCountry}}Morgan claimed that 23 employees quit in just seven days.
{{/usCountry}}“The first week, 23 people quit. Oh my gosh. It's not that they don't want to work from home. They don't want to work,” he said.
He interpreted that as evidence that those employees did not merely want the flexibility of working from home — they did not want the level of work or accountability expected of them.
(Also read: ‘It takes screenshots every 10 minutes’: Employee shocked by new office software)
Remarks spark debate
John Morgan’s remarks on employees’ work ethics sparked a debate online, with many people saying that tracking employees through cameras amounted to an invasion of privacy.
“I think the key tracking would be sufficient enough… cameras? No,” wrote one Instagram user.
“Isn’t work tracked by productivity?” another asked.
“I don’t want somebody monitoring me in the privacy of my home. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to work,” a third person pointed out.
“A good employer knows if their employees are being productive by the results, not the keystrokes or cameras monitoring them. I'd quit as well,” one commenter declared.