Argument127 【0706G－MYTH-II小组】第12次作业 by ploplo

ploploUID: 2320001

题目：ARGUMENT127 - The vice president for human resources at Climpson Industries sent the following recommendation to the company's president.

"In an effort to improve our employees' productivity, we should implement electronic monitoring of employees' Internet use from their workstations. Employees who use the Internet from their workstations need to be identified and punished if we are to reduce the number of work hours spent on personal or recreational activities, such as shopping or playing games. By installing software to detect employees' Internet use on company computers, we can prevent employees from wasting time, foster a better work ethic at Climpson, and improve our overall profits."
字数：436          用时：上午 12:29:35          日期：2007-4-7

In the argument the author suggests that Climpson should implement electronic monitoring of employee's Internet use from workstation. Although the argument is well-presented, it still suffers from several flaws.

  The threshold assumption that the author provides is that people's using of Internet has greatly influenced their work. No simple evidence, however testifies the viewpoint. In fact Internet possibly plays a positive role during the work time. Perhaps the employees mostly get online in order to search for information which is in need in their job rather than to have fun. Even though, they might spend a bit of time on web-surfing, the short rest they have may effectively help them out of fatigue and to perform better in the work later. Without ruling out the alternatives above, the conclusion that using internet in working time would reduce the efficiency is unconvincing.

  Even if the use of Internet makes some negative efforts on the work, the author fails to convince that it would prevent employees from wasting time as long as the software is installed. For one thing, people might choose other ways to recreate, such as reading newspapers, listening to the music, playing cards etc, when they find Internet is under supervising. It would also lead to low productivity in this case. For another, the use of the software as some kind of monitor might make employees feel that they are not trusted by the boss, which possibly results in trust crisis .Obviously, the monitoring would hurt employees feeling and refrain their enthusiasm in their work. Consequently the software might not be effective in preventing employees' wasting time if the author cannot provide more strong proof.

  Even if the software makes sense in lower people's time for recreation, we could conclude that neither the better work ethic would be fostered nor the overall profits would be improved after the software is put into use. On the one hand, the software itself might cost a lot of money , which may far exceed the margin it brings. On the other hand, it is possible that the software would greatly slow the operating speed of the computers, which might lower both the employees’ productivity and Climpson’s profits. So the point that software’s using guarantee the increase of revenue will never warranted, unless the possibilities mentioned are ruling out.

  In sum, the author's suggestion is unconvincing. To better evaluate the conclusion, the author should provides more evidence that people will work better under the supervising of the software and the software itself will not influence the normal work in Climpson, and is cost of it is reasonable and worthy.