Dutch employee fired by U.S. firm for shutting off webcam awarded €75K in court

From Glassdoor for related employer:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.glassdoor.com&#x2F;Reviews&#x2F;Chetu-Reviews-E231082.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.glassdoor.com&#x2F;Reviews&#x2F;Chetu-Reviews-E231082.htm</a><p>&gt;&gt; Review: “You&#x27;ll discover during training week that the the company will watch over you all day, even long tenured employees are watched via their WebCam.”<p>&gt;&gt; “Glassdoor Alert: Attempt to Inflate Reviews — We have evidence that someone has taken steps to artificially inflate the rating for this employer with positive reviews posted in violation of our Community Guidelines. We have removed these reviews. Please exercise your best judgment when evaluating this employer. Learn more about Glassdoor Alerts:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.glassdoor.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;article&#x2F;Glassdoor-Alerts-Badge-Program" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.glassdoor.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;article&#x2F;Glassdoor-Alerts-Badge-...</a><p>_________________<p>From related company’s homepage:<p>&gt;&gt; “We are proud to employ over 2,800 in-house developers with a variety of software development experience in an array of industries.”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chetu.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chetu.com&#x2F;</a>

<i>he was ordered to take part in a virtual training period called a &quot;Corrective Action Program.&quot;</i><p>This is the sort of name given to processes uses when an employee is already performing below expectations. (Where I work it’s a more euphemistic Performance Improvement). If that’s the case here then his firing was a bit less sudden than it appears. Though the entire monitoring process seems draconian regardless.

I love it when US companies meet Dutch labor laws.

<i>&gt; Less than a week after the plaintiff was fired, the Rijswijk branch of Chetu Inc. was deregistered from the Chamber of Commerce and shut down on 2 September, records show.</i><p>So, it&#x27;s a fair assumption that no organisation in the Netherlands is going to pay out as a result of this.<p>What are the chances of the employee being able to enforce this judgment in a Florida court?

Home is not owned by employer. So for this type of surveillance employer should get consent from all inhabitants.

&quot;insubordination&quot;<p>wtf, was this a job or a prison camp?

It&#x27;s always something toxic when it comes to US companies. I had to do multiple background checks. In Romania they are unheard of.

I would never work for a company that required me to have my webcam on for the full work day.

Unfortunately this is well within corporate “go away” money. They’ll gladly dish over 75k to get a threat off their books. It’s the corporate equivalent to stuffing 20 bucks in your pocket in case you’re held up while out on a run and don’t carry your wallet. Add a zero to make it 750k if you want corporations to think about it deeper.

It&#x27;s ironic. My company hired Chetu some years ago. Their devs were doing 20 mins of work, but charging for 8.<p>We couldn&#x27;t trust them to do anything.<p>And Chetu doesn&#x27;t trust its employees. Heh

I wonder how work culture will devolve from this kind of idea..<p>If I had a company, I&#x27;d much rather that my employees generate value, rather than &quot;looking busy&quot; and &quot;working hard&quot;

<i>Chetu argued instead that the webcam was no different than if the worker had been present in the office being observed by management.</i><p>Is this a company where a manager is literally watching over employees for the whole day? I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s normal outside of things like production lines and other blue-collar type environments.

<i>&gt;there was no urgent reason given to justify the immediate dismissal given.” He alleged that the termination was disproportionate</i><p>Damn sweet. I wish we had such great employee protection laws in Austria, where the company&#x2F;employer can terminate your employment relationship without any reason at all.<p><i>&gt;Less than a week after the plaintiff was fired, the Rijswijk branch of Chetu Inc. was deregistered from the Chamber of Commerce and shut down on 2 September, records show</i><p>So the company knew they were in the wrong for firing him and immediately shut down their Dutch operations to avoid the lawsuit.

FWIW, while they are a U.S. incorporated firm, it looks like it&#x27;s actually an Indian company in terms of staff &#x2F; leadership.

Kind of weird that the website hosting a story about intrusive spying has a cookie policy that essentially says &quot;we&#x27;re going to set a cookie to track you around the intarwebs and you can&#x27;t opt out of it.&quot;<p>One more site to add to the memory hole.

I’m a little surprised they had a Dutch employee and did know the laws.<p>Every company I worked for with foreign employees, hired (or more often acquired) knew the lay of the land.

This company&#x27;s website, offer, and videos gives me such creepy vibes... American-business-software kind. Everyone are so proud, fulfilled, trained, and friendly. Have one shameful few months long episode at a similar one in Czechia... CREEPY.

Can this actually be enforced. It sounds like it’s a Dutch court v US entity where they were a contractor. If the company had a Dutch entity they wouldn’t make such obvious errors in judgement as they’d know the local laws

That&#x27;s what I like about europe: legal protections. I have the feeling there&#x27;s no way that would ever happen in East Asia (excepting maaaybe Japan). Tho it would probably happen in parts of SE Asia, Indonesia etc, informed by a cultural and political impetus to slough off the perceived historical yoke of Western colonial exploitation. But other places (like Ph, and Thailand, I guess) this would never happen, I think as they need their Western manufacturing contracts too dearly... I think.

Unpopular opinion: decisions like this hurt European workers. As an employer with 270 full time employees and many more contractors, I simply will not hire people in the EU and especially not in Netherlands because of the legal risks from a government with too many regulations.<p>An employer should be free to use webcam monitoring (no different than if the employee was in person with a supervisor nearby).

&gt; shut down on 2 September<p>That seems unfortunate; the employee&#x27;s best chance for collecting is if the employer continues to have business operations in the Netherlands.

It sounds like the company is really paranoid about their remote workers being actually subcontracted to a cheaper locale or something.

If the boss wants to monitor me working they should better not tell me. My entire intelligence melts down in anxiety and performance drops to near-zero if I know I am being watched. Why the heck do they want to watch people? What are they trying to discover? Isn&#x27;t monitoring the results of the job enough?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;profiles.forbes.com&#x2F;members&#x2F;tech&#x2F;profile&#x2F;Atal-Bansal-President-CEO-Chetu&#x2F;50d215cc-3897-410e-aa8b-78c1567f0aeb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;profiles.forbes.com&#x2F;members&#x2F;tech&#x2F;profile&#x2F;Atal-Bansal...</a>

Sounds like this company is a software farm for cheap contract work.

Some employers want to be able to take random photos to ensure remote workers are working at their computer during business hours.

“worker had been present in the office being observed by management”<p>And yet there are people who prefer working on site and “being observed by management”.

The CEO of this company seems very deep into &#x27;hype capitalism&#x27; - all his recent writing is about the metaverse, NFTs etc. The fact that the Dutch subsidiary of this company tried to de-register itself within days of firing the employee suggests to me that its business models are extractive rather than productive.

what a pleasant piece of news