Company Carbon Footprint Schemes

I noticed a story on the BBC television this morning – but can’t find it on their website – regarding a pilot scheme being run by Cisco to monitor employee’s personal carbon footprints.

I did find a website discussing this scheme. It includes monitoring both at work and at home. It has this to say.

Implementing a carbon reduction scheme can prove challenging. Despite well meant intentions, programmes can sometimes be considered as a waste of money or worse, intrusive, by staff.

Intrusive doesn’t even come close to describing it. Apparently, according to the BBC story, the scheme will give bonuses for people installing low energy light bulbs (you know, the ones with crap light output that you cannot put into the bin) and fines for taking long haul flights on holiday. What the fucking fuckitty fuck!?! I would never, ever, allow an employer to monitor my personal life. Ever.

Sadly, there’s always a danger that someone, somewhere will look to question an organisation’s climate change scheme – be it the science behind the sentiment or the cost of implementation and any ongoing management.

There is nothing “sad” about it. What people do outside of work is none of the employer’s business. What type of bulbs we use (and I’ll be using incandescents for as long as I am able) to taking flights on holiday is not something that the employee should feel any need to share with their employer. Indeed, they should never be asked. Actually, as an aside, I don’t fly these days – but that has everything to do with paranoid security rather than carbon footprint bollocks.

I am one of those people who values personal privacy almost to the point of being obsessive about it. I never took part in work arranged activities, nor joined any work arranged clubs or memberships and kept my personal life entirely separate from my work life. The two remained firmly in discrete compartments and any attempts by my employers to creep into the personal sphere were vigorously resisted. Consequently, schemes such as this infuriate me. Sure, some people like to mingle work and personal stuff; many of us do not, though, and what we do in our personal lives is entirely outside the employer’s sphere of control and influence and so it should remain. An employer buys a period of time from us – nothing more. During that time, they set the rules. Outside of that time is none of their damned business*.

There is one positive to this story; it is, for the moment, voluntary:

The scheme, which recently gained coverage as a case study in the Financial Times newspaper, applies to employees actions in the office, but also – and controversially – at home. Intrusive though it may sound, the scheme is voluntary and Cisco rewards its employees financially if they keep to the carbon emission quotas. So far, a not insignificant 20 per cent of the company is said to have signed up to the scheme.

And when those of us in the “not insignificant” 80% who stick to the “fuck off and mind your own business” line still refuse to “volunteer”? What then?

Fortunately, I am self-employed, so no employer will be monitoring me.

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*There are some reasonable exceptions to this. My own industry has a strict drugs and alcohol policy. You can drink alcohol in your own time, but may not turn up for work with alcohol in your system. The same applies to narcotics, although the policy means in practice, abstinence given the time that the substance remains in one’s system. The reason that I do not complain about this is because the influence of these substances affects performance at work and may cause injury or death on the rail infrastructure.