It’s always tough to come back to reality after a vacation, but I was feeling pretty good once I started catching up with my coworkers. I hadn’t been on shift for a little over a week when I walked into the break room from my vacation and saw a wall lined with several posters promoting a new digital tool called “MyTime.”
I left the break room without thinking much about it. As I was walking through the store, a co-manager approached me and handed over a zebra, telling me to get caught up on my Axonify training modules. I took the zebra and walked back over near the break room, sat down on a pallet, and logged on to complete the training.
Sure enough, one of the training sessions was explaining MyTime.
I know there are people out there who diligently read the Terms of Service for everything they sign up for, but I am usually not one of them. When I tried to rush through my first login, the system spit me back to the page with the Terms, indicating I had to at least pull them up and pretend to read them. When I did pull them up, I saw they were relatively short and so decided to read over them quickly.
I’m glad I did. It turns out that agreeing to use MyTime on your phone gives Kroger some serious control over your personal property.
The company, according to these Terms, reserves the right to “monitor my usage of company-owned or company-enabled functionality on or through the device, or to access the device upon its request, if needed to comply with a court order, a litigation hold directive, or other legal or business purposes…”
Wait, what? If I use MyTime on my phone, does that mean Kroger would be able to access it at will? I know it says “company-owned or company-enabled” but how am I supposed to know how those lines are drawn or who exactly is drawing them? And is this access restricted by little more than an “honor system”? Would I even know if or who is accessing my device? What exactly constitutes “business purposes”?
It didn’t stop there, though. The Terms continued to explain that “the company has the right to execute (and I hereby consent to the execution of) an electronic wipe (remote or otherwise) of all data on the device, or a factory reset of the device, in the event of loss (including temporary loss) or theft of the device or separation of my employment with the company, or as otherwise deemed necessary by the company…”
So now I have to agree to a preemptive wipe of all my data on my personal device if the company decides it has been lost or, more shockingly, if my employment with the company ends? So if I quit, the company can just decide to wipe/factory reset my phone? And they wouldn’t even need to get my authorization because it is already offered within these Terms of Service?
Call me paranoid, but I don’t exactly trust multi-billion dollar corporations to show restraint and consideration to the employees they already pay poverty wages. As I sat there mulling over this legal document, I kept coming back to how things seem to almost always be on the company’s terms. The only thing keeping them from just grinding us into dust, taking over our phones and computers, and upending our lives with relentless Wall Street-driven “innovation” is the union contract we have inherited.
If the company had made it mandatory, they know they would have had to negotiate the conditions of its implementation with the union. By making it “voluntary,” they can get around the question of bargaining with us or – apparently – even properly informing us.
This has highlighted two important lessons for me. First, always read the fine print and never trust the company. They always have their interests first and our interests last, so don’t ever buy into the nonsense about being a “family” or whatever manipulative nonsense the company is choosing to use.
Second, for all the limits, frustrations, and problems we face with our union, I am still very thankful to be a union grocery clerk. If we are having problems in our locals, the solution isn’t to abandon or take for granted what little protections we have in the face of a company that has no respect for us. Instead, the solution can only be to work together to strengthen our understanding of what makes unions strong so we can build something that is more effective at protecting our interests in the face of a company.
So, to sum up, just say no to MyTime and say yes to building up a fighting union!