We're keeping score. So tote more barges, lift more bales.

The summer before I started college, I had a plum job working on the assembly line in a shoe factory. Not surprisingly, I was at the end of the line, where the shoes and boots were cleaned up and packed in boxes. The work didn't require the skill level of, say, the leather cutters who cut the hides into shoe and boot pieces, and who were rewarded for using as much of the hide up as humanly possible. But it wasn't entirely unskilled. (Mostly it was lower-paid and female-dominated, unlike the male jobs: cutting, stitching...)

My task was cleaning the boots and finishing their raw edges. Mostly combat boots.

Cleaning the boots required sponging off, with a sponge soaked in acetone, bits of gluey gum that was stuck here and there. Finishing the raw edges was trickier. You used a different sponge to apply shoe polish to those raw edges without dribbling any polish on the boot's innards. 

The boots showed up on racks that held a dozen pairs. Attached to the side of the rack was a piece of cardboard that held the piecework coupons. (Pronounced KEW-pons.) 

By the time the boots arrived at my worktable, most of the coupons had been clipped by the earlier workers. 

For each rack completed, we clipped the coupons and inserted them into a coupon book. At the end of the week, we turned the coupon books in and, if you exceeded the required productivity level, you got a pay boost.

At first, I misunderstood how this worked. I thought that, in addition to the pay - $1.40 an hour, the then minimum wage - I would make extra for each coupon I turned in. 

Not so, as my friend Kim and I found out after we saw our first paycheck. (Kim worked on the table behind me. She was a "heel podder," tasked with gluing the leather heel piece into the boot. Heel podding didn't hold her back. Kim went on to become a partner in one of Boston's most prestigious law firms.)

So we both decided to really turn it on. Working at a furious, work-up-a-sweat pace (needless to say, the factory wasn't air conditioned), we managed to get ourselves up to the minimum expected standard. No extra for us!

After that, we didn't even try to make the rate.

I guess I just wasn't cut out to be a boot polisher, but some of the women I worked around could really go. I remember in particular a Polish woman named Helen. Talk about fast and furious. She probably made another thirty or forty cents an hour, and her work (unlike mine: I slopped a lot of shoe polish on those boot innards). My productivity levels weren't helped by the fact that Helen occasionally eyeballed a rack that I had pushed on to the next stop and rolled it back my way as not being good enough.

Since I wasn't able to achieve the productivity goal, it was fortunate that, halfway through the summer, I was promoted to office work. (I think it was because I wore glasses and knew enough Spanish to tell the Cuban ladies when there was no work on Saturday, which was usually a half day.) Not that I needed much convincing that white collar work was going to be the way to go, but yippee: for office work, I was paid a whopping $1.70. 

When I showed up at the office on my first day - wearing a turquoise cotton pique A-line dress, tottering on a pair of three-inch heels - I found that my first task was operating the tiny rotary printing press used to make the piecework coupons. 

Anyway, not making the piecework rate when I was on the shop floor was pretty much my one and only experience with workplace productivity monitoring. Blessedly.

But fast forward fifty-plus years, and many workers are not so lucky. 

As New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Arya Sundaram chronicled in “The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score,", productivity monitoring tools are becoming more and more prevalent. 

IN LOWER-PAYING JOBS, the monitoring is already ubiquitous: not just at Amazon, where the second-by-second measurements became notorious, but also for Kroger cashiers, UPS drivers and millions of others. Eight of the 10 largest private U.S. employers track the productivity metrics of individual workers, many in real time, according to an examination by The New York Times.

Now digital productivity monitoring is also spreading among white-collar jobs and roles that require graduate degrees. Many employees, whether working remotely or in person, are subject to trackers, scores, “idle” buttons, or just quiet, constantly accumulating records. Pauses can lead to penalties, from lost pay to lost jobs.

Some radiologists see scoreboards showing their “inactivity” time and how their productivity stacks up against their colleagues’. At companies including J.P. Morgan, tracking how employees spend their days, from making phone calls to composing emails, has become routine practice. In Britain, Barclays Bank scrapped prodding messages to workers, like “Not enough time in the Zone yesterday,” after they caused an uproar. At UnitedHealth Group, low keyboard activity can affect compensation and sap bonuses. Public servants are tracked, too: In June, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority told engineers and other employees they could work remotely one day a week if they agreed to full-time productivity monitoring.

Architects, academic administrators, doctors, nursing home workers and lawyers described growing electronic surveillance over every minute of their workday. They echoed complaints that employees in many lower-paid positions have voiced for years: that their jobs are relentless, that they don’t have control — and in some cases, that they don’t even have enough time to use the bathroom. In interviews and in hundreds of written submissions to The Times, white-collar workers described being tracked as “demoralizing,” “humiliating” and “toxic.” Micromanagement is becoming standard, they said.

The stories are U-G-L-Y ugly. 

A finance executive took a job as a contractor that promised to pay $200 an hour. To her chagrin, she found out that she was only paid for "active work." Reading, thinking, mentoring staff. If you were doing any offline work, a.k.a., "manual time," it had to have been approved. And as if monitoring "active work" weren't enough, the productivity system her company used snapped periodic photos to see if you were working.

At a major healthcare company, when therapists gathered to discuss cases, or social workers were counseling patients, the hours spent were considered "idle time," which didn't count toward bonuses and promotions. 

Worse yet, hospice chaplains at one organization were caught up in the productivity madness.

But two years ago, [an] employer started requiring chaplains to accrue more of what it called “productivity points.” A visit to the dying: as little as one point. Participating in a funeral: one and three-quarters points. A phone call to grieving relatives: one-quarter point.

...Sometimes the chaplains sacrificed points, risking reprimand or trying to make them up later. But their jobs depended on meeting the standards. So they shifted whom they saw when, the time they spent and the depth of their relationships with the dying, some said. Group settings like nursing homes were rich sources of points. Single patients in homes ...were not.

Swell.

No surprise, counter tools that tap the keyboard have sprung up. But those won't help if you're on candid camera. And I'm sure it's a matter of time before the productivity software companies figure out what's real work and what's fake work.

Nor is it any surprise that there's been pushback: unionization efforts are, against all odds, succeeding. And employees are voting with their feet and leaving productivity gulags for places that don't evaluate their accomplishments based on how fast you type. 

No wonder there's a Great Resignation on.

Happy to have gotten out of the workplace before this became a thing. Hard to imagine anything more dreadful.