Last year we extended second factor sign in to everyone, including the yard and warehouse staff who use our systems only for payslips, holiday requests and the daily vehicle and equipment checks. There were three hundred and eighty of them. The project plan assumed each would install an authenticator app on their own phone, because that is what the office staff had done without complaint.

Forty three said no. Six did not own a smartphone. Others did not want a work app on a phone their children used, did not want to be reachable by work outside their shift, or asked who would pay if the app needed a newer phone than the one they had. The staff forum representative put the questions to the operations director, who forwarded them to me, because it was an IT project.

I had treated it as a technical choice. It was not. Whether a job requires people to provide their own equipment is a question about the terms of the job, and it belongs to the people who set those terms.…