(There's nothing new about this sort of thing. Back in 1991 a bunch of Goldman-Sachs IT managers came to work and discovered that they could no longer log in to PROFS, the mainframe email system that was at the heart of the Oliver North Iran-Contra scandal.)
Last November, at the offices of Gawker Media, a series of editors were summoned, one by one, via direct message on Slack, the company’s inner-office chat and collaboration platform, to a conference room. The executive managing editor wanted a word, they were told. Workers who hadn’t been messaged began to notice that the names of the summoned, ever present on their contact lists, were going dim and then disappearing from Slack. “I had no idea layoffs were coming—none of us did,” a former member of the editorial staff told me. “After I returned to my desk, my Slack account had been disabled. I guess the fear was that employees who had been let go would spread word to their coworkers. But it’s Gawker after all, a place where secrets, lies and even closed-door layoffs eventually come into the light.” full: http://www.theawl.com/2016/02/the-deactivation-of-the-american-worker _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
