Brave New Workplace

1980:

The computerized control of work has become so pervasive in Bell Telephone's clerical sector that management now has the capacity to measure how many times a phone rings before it is answered, how long a customer is put on hold, how long it takes a clerk to complete a call. …Each morning, workers receive computer printouts listing their break and lunch times based on the anticipated traffic patterns of the day. …Before computerization, a worker's morning break normally came about two hours after the beginning of the shift; now, it can come as early as fifteen minutes into the working day. Workers cannot go to the bathroom unless they find someone to take their place. If you close your terminal, right away the computer starts clacking away and starts ringing a bell.

From Brave New Workplace by Robert Howard, in Working Papers for a New Society, Cambridge Policy Studies Institute, November-December 1980 (As cited in New Information Technology: For What by Tom Athanisou, Processed World, April 1981)

The essay ends with, “In a world where everything and everyone is treated as an object to be bought and sold, the new technologies — and most of the old ones for that matter — will inevitably create hardship and human misery. […] The ease with which computers are used as instruments of social control cannot be allowed to obscure their liberatory potential.”