As COVID-19 continues to blaze across the United States, people who have the ability to work from home are doing so.

No more commute, no more dressing up, and it must be nice to stream Cobra Kai without your manager being able to catch you, right?

Right?

Yeah, right.

See, your boss needs to be all big brother now with you away from your workplace.

So to do that, they have to watch you in you, totally creepy ways.

I'm Gustavo Ariano. You're listening to The Times, Daily News from the LA Times. It's Wednesday, January 12, 2022. Companies are

increasingly using technology to monitor the activities of their workers while they're on the

clock wherever they are. Today, we examine how and why companies are spying on their workers at

home and whether there's a backlash coming. So, a Gallup poll last fall found that 45% of full-time U.S. employees were still working from home,

at least some of their hours, a full quarter of them exclusively work from home.

My LA Times colleague Don Lee reported that most evidence shows remote work hasn't hurt U.S. productivity,

but you know how bosses are. They always want to know what their workers are doing. Don covers hurt U.S. productivity, but you know how bosses are. They always want to know

what their workers are doing. Don covers a U.S. and global economy from Washington, D.C., and joins me now.

Welcome to the Times, Don. Hi, Gustavo. Good to join you. So how prevalent is this practice of

companies monitoring their remote workers? Well, I don't think anybody knows for sure, but we can get some indication by just the soaring

sales of employee monitoring software and surveys by companies that indicate a huge jump in

the number of employers that have put in these kinds of programs since the pandemic.

And by some measures, it's doubled. And so it's been a striking increase.

There was once that you showed that one of the companies said that before the pandemic,

something like only 30% of their sales of monitoring went to companies and now 70% of them do.

I think you were referring to one of the providers of employer monitoring software who said that early on in their years, this was pre-pandemic, their sales were mostly driven by companies wanting to just have these monitoring programs for security

...