While billionaire Orlando attorney John Morgan’s law firm fights to protect the rights of U.S. workers, Morgan revealed last week that he’s not above creating a surveillance state for his own workforce.
Speaking to hosts of the podcast “Iced Coffee Hour,” Morgan said that when his personal injury firm, Morgan & Morgan, created its work-from-home policy, nearly two dozen of his employees quit within the first week.
Why?
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Morgan recalled saying on the podcast. “You can work from home, but guess what? We’re going to put a camera on your computer. We’re going to put a camera up your ass.”
“We won’t look at you,” he added. “You’ll be a pixel.” Twenty-three employees quit within the first week, according to Morgan. “It’s not that they don’t want to work from home,” he argued. “They don’t want to work.”
Video footage of Morgan sharing this anecdote on the podcast — where the 70-year-old further discussed topics such as MAGA politics, his most lucrative legal cases, and his “vandalized” billboards scheme — went viral on social media this week.
Morgan, a pot-friendly Orlandoan and saucy legend known locally for buying rounds for the bar at the old Wally’s back in the day (ed. note: and Tom & Jerry’s, RIP), is better known outside the City Beautiful for helping to bankroll ballot initiatives in Florida to raise the state minimum wage to $15 an hour — which passed in 2020 — and legalize medical marijuana, another successful venture.
But Morgan has also spoken openly of his use of cheaper foreign labor from countries such as El Salvador and Belize to power his law firm’s call centers — a practice he confirmed again on the “Iced Coffee Hour.”
After Orlando Weekly questioned Morgan over pay rates for office employees in the U.S. in 2017, Morgan — a year later — announced a minimum wage of $15 an hour at his firm by 2019, putting his money where his mouth was on the wage issue.
Morgan’s firm today employs roughly 5,000 employees nationwide, including about 1,200 attorneys. According to People magazine, Morgan first defended his Big Brother-esque work-from-home camera policy on the podcast “Success Story” on July 22 — where he initially said it was 13 people that quit within the first week, not 23.
Morgan admitted that the 13 employees (23?) who decided to quit, instead of allowing for a camera to (per Morgan) “measure keystrokes” and broadly surveil their activity on the clock, felt the policy was “invasive.”
“They didn’t want to be accountable,” Morgan claimed. “What they didn’t want to do is they didn’t want to work, because they’re lazy. But they want to be paid to work from home.”
Working remotely became all but a necessity for many during the COVID-19 pandemic — or a luxury, if you were given no other option than to go into an office and risk contracting a deadly illness or lose your job.
The rise of WFH has spurred a flurry of research and debate on the pros and cons of remote work, ranging from its effect on productivity to mental health and work-life balance.
Morgan himself admits he spends winters these days in Hawaii, and recently shut down a rumored run for Florida governor citing, in part, the fact that he likes to be able to take a weed gummy during hurricanes — something a governor likely would not be able to do (without facing sharp rebuke, anyway).
Meanwhile, a growing share of U.S. elders are working past retirement age because they can’t afford to retire. About one in five Americans (or 20 percent) age 65 and older are still active in the workforce, according to federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That’s up from 10 percent in 1985.
“Look, there are people that I have no problem working from home because there are certain people that, you know, they’re going to work from home,” Morgan acknowledged on the “Success Story” podcast.
As of March, nearly a quarter of the U.S. workforce worked from home or “teleworked,” according to BLS. That includes about 6.7 percent of workers age 16 to 24, 25 percent of workers age 25 to 54, and 24 percent of workers 55 and older.
If you’re one of the former Morgan & Morgan employees who quit after Morgan rolled out this camera policy for remote workers, Orlando Weekly wants to hear from you. Contact us by emailing news@orlandoweekly.com.
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