by an anonymous USA Member
Communications Committee note for further context: Last Wednesday on May 13th, over 140 USA members met together to discuss the potential implementation of the time-keeping software and location tracking system called Kronos for USA members in Administration & Finance (A & F). Management contacted your Executive Board earlier this month to announce this implementation and an impact bargaining team is almost finalized.
Chronos, the personified and deified notion of time in Greek mythology, is the harbinger of seasons, of passage, of cyclical inevitability, of death. The timekeeping company, HR’s friend, and the demonstrable morale killing entity, Kronos, mimics only the worst parts of what the mythology it is named after represents. Decay, death, demotivation, deterioration. With arts and humanities and social sciences already being torn away at for the sake of the hard sciences, the violent force-feeding of AI, the ever burgeoning business school, and the always struggling sports teams, seeing the ways in which institutional management is contracting with a company that is solely there as a punitive and invasive mechanism is disheartening to say the least.
Our institution is more concerned with becoming a profiteering entity than doing the work of education, and nowhere is it more evident than in making staff across the board more and more insecure.
USA members are by and large barely earning a livable wage for this reason and food insecurity is on the rise. Our institution is more concerned with becoming a profiteering entity than doing the work of education, and nowhere is it more evident than in making staff across the board more and more insecure. To introduce this violently invasive technology that tracks and spies and disregards the humanity of the workforce laboring at unimaginably difficult scale is simply an intentional attempt to force laborers into deep submission, a preemptive disciplining to create a workforce that is far more convenient to manage because you would know our every move.
Time, temporality, and duration, these things are not abstract concepts, nor are they simply philosophical musings. They are things that contain deep meaning and have concrete and material impact on the people who keep this institution running. We will not be harassed in our work, and if you attack a few of us with this move, you attack all of us with this move. Solidarity is an active practice, something we consider vital for our survival. You have the chance to work alongside us to create a better, more secure and healthy environment for all, but instead you choose to wield time as the thing of a death of morale, of spirit, of any kind of wellbeing. Decay, deterioration, disregard, and demotivation are all that can come from this, and the knock on effect from USA to PSU and to MSP will be felt across campus. We work well beyond the hours spent working on campus, all of you know that for a fact, so please consider what it means to create a rubric as violent and destructive as this.
Painting: “Saturn Devouring His Son” by Francisco Goya, c. 1820-1823
Saturn is the Roman name for the titan Chronos.
