The vice president of 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

In this argument, the president of the company recommends setting restrictions on the unnecessary internet use of the employees to augment the overall profit of the company. To do this, the president recommends installing a computer software to detect employees who waste their time with the unnecessary use of the internet. The conclusion of better profit by the more efficiency of employees, is based on assumptions that with probability of being wrong, has made the argument untenable.

First, the threshold assumption is that employees waste their time significantly that are needed to be punished and prohibited. It is possible that employees are so skilled that do their tasks efficiently and then they go to use the internet for a little entertainment. In this case, they get lesser bored and can even work more efficiently. Hence, with the changes in the time they work, the productivity might not bring positive changes.

Secondly, it has been assumed that employees would be punished and readily be controlled. The employees might respond negatively with such a limitation and punishment. As it is mentioned later, they might use an insignificant amount of time for personal uses and they might see this reaction as an unfair one. In this case, the ambiance of work might become inconvenient. Even more, the employee might become anger and vent their anger by appealing to sabotage.

Thirdly, even if the wasting time is significant, the author further assumes that employees only waste their time with internet via their computers. It is possible that they use their cell phones to continue wasting their time after implementation of restrictions. They might chat with each other or do other things in order to spend their time. The argument needs to rule out all these possible scenarios.

Finally, the price of installing, maintenance, and management of such surveillance software can be so high that the software itself becomes a trouble. Consider the company using thousands of computers, the time to install the software on each computer might not be justifiable, let alone the price of it.

In short, as discussed above, there are several assumptions the president of the Climpson Industries has made to reach the conclusion of installing a surveillance software. There is no evidence supporting the assumptions. With them being likely unwarranted, the argument is rendered unpersuasive since any ramification might exact a high price on the company.