| Job Style |
June 11, 2020
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| He was at a meeting of his club activity, when one lady starting talking with him, "I wonder how workers are working at home. I mean 'tele-work'." Tele-working means that workers work at home using their computers. In the current corona virus situation, there was a 'lock down' in many countries and cities. People were prohibited from going out. Sometimes they could go to work, but they were asked to work from home if possible. In this country, when the coronavirus started to spread, only about 5 percent of companies could deal with tele-working, because they didn't have the systems to allow their workers to work at home. Now almost all companies have adopted to tele-working on a certain level. She continued, "I mean, how do they work? I don't think that companies would allow their workers to use sensitive information at home because of security reasons." Another member said, "Yeah. I don't think that public servants can work with citizens' information and private data at home." The members of the group were a housewife whose husband worked at a factory as a mechanic, a retired person, a part time cook at a nursery school, and a self-employed person who didn't have an office or any employees, so they didn't know precisely about it. This thing reminded him of what an economist who complained about an  economic newspaper on a TV program saying that he never read about how companies have managed to allow their workers to work from home. He said that this newspaper should research and report on how various companies have implemented a structure to allow their workers to work from home, and the information should be a good study for other companies, which are their core readers. Actually, after the coronavirus pandemic started, he had been getting information through three newspapers. He originally subscribed to a local newspaper as well as an English newspaper published in this country, but recently he started to subscribe to another newspaper that was published in the US. It was online, and it was cheap for the first one year. The former newspapers couldn't give him enough information about the coronavirus, so he started to subscribe to the new one, but even with this news source, they never mentioned about how workers worked remotely in detail. He said, "When I talk with my insurance company's lady, we meet in a restaurant and she uses her lap top computer so I am able to check about my insurance on her computer, and I can sign on the screen using a touch pen. Her company is one of the biggest insurance companies, and the number of their workers are huge. Maybe each agent has their own computers. The data they use is sensitive, for example, customers' name, sex, birth day, age, address, phone number, insurance type, etc. As she brought the computer with her every time, maybe everything was secured somehow." Several years ago Apple refused to tell the CIA the password of a certain iPhone that a criminal had. Eventually Apple assisted the CIA, but he wondered why that even the CIA couldn't crack the password of an iPhone. So maybe companies, under contract with a computer security company, remotely checked their workers' home computers in advance, and let them use them. He remember a long time ago that some careless worker left his company's laptop computer, with all of their customers' data, in a telephone booth, and it became big news. He bought various things by net shopping. So far his passwords seemed to be safe. And some people use their smartphones instead of a wallet. If the security was lax, nobody would use the system. He had never used, but he saw on TV about online meeting tools, like Zoom, that were popular now. He heard that this type of web meeting systems were provided as apps. He only used Skype, and he knew that it was very convenient. He heard recently that in the U.S., a mid-sized company that researched tourism and other information for the travel agencies decided to close their office in New York, and their workers would work from home. The boss predicted that half of his workers would leave New York. One of the workers appeared on the program and said that she recently moved back to her hometown where her parents lived. The house that she currently rents is four times as large as her former one in New York, and the rental fee is the same. The program said that young families with young kids tend to like to live in more natural surroundings. A couple of other interesting things that the boss of this company mentioned was that he started to have online lunch meetings, and also if he or other members needed to meet someone in person, he would rent out a meeting room. He thought that the "Post Coronavirus World" would be a more flexible world. |
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*sensitive :繊細な
*public servant :公務員
*nursery school :保育園
*self-employed :自営業
*implement :実行する
*structure :しくみ
*in detail :詳しく
*insurance :保険
*agent :外交員
*secure :安全にする、危害から守る
*crack :暗号などを解く
*lax :ゆるい
*predict :予言する