Workers in a Crisis: The Need for Better Privacy Protections
With more employees now clocking-in for work at home, employers — anxious about productivity — are monitoring their remote workforce. Workers have no choice but to allow their employers to collect this data on them. Congress should pass worker data protections to safeguard workers’ personal privacy. The Center’s Worker Privacy Act will provide workers the safeguards they need from invasions of their privacy.
Workplace surveillance is far from a new phenomenon. Surveillance technology is already used to monitor and direct Amazon employees, delivery drivers, and gig workers. Employers surveilled remote and freelance workers by taking timed screenshots of computer screens and pictures of workers. One remote worker timed his bathroom breaks to the automated pictures so he would not be penalized for being away from his desk.
With more workers at home, more employers are buying surveillance technology to ensure their workforce is staying productive. They are largely using common pre-pandemic technology that allows them to monitor how many emails are sent, keystrokes, how much time employees spend on work, and employees’ monitors. Zoom recently removed a feature allowing employers to see how attentive their employees were during calls. Although experts predicted surveillance would expand to more workers, we could not have anticipated it coming so soon.
Currently, there are no meaningful legal protections restricting worker surveillance. And recent federal privacy bills do not cover employees. If these bills are passed as written, data rights, such as right to access, correct, and delete, will be restricted to consumer data. Workers are in the dark about what data is collected and how it is used. In the era of big data, workers deserve better.
The Center’s worker data protection bill, the Worker Privacy Act (WPA), bolsters workers’ rights by guarding their personal privacy from employer surveillance at the workplace or at home. The bill requires:
- Transparency around data collected about workers;
- Employer disclosure of how data will be used;
- Transparency around how algorithms are used;
- Opportunity for workers to provide input on decisions around data, surveillance, and algorithms; and
- Negotiation between workers and employers to decide the least invasive measure.
These protections will prevent employers from blindsiding workers the way some workers have been during this pandemic. The recent worker protests from several companies (like Instacart, Amazon, Shipt, and construction workers) demonstrate workers know what protections they need. Workers should be empowered to petition for and receive appropriate safeguards. The WPA puts more control over decisions about data and technology in the workplace into the hands of workers.
Gabrielle Rejouis is an Associate with the Center. You can find her on Twitter at @gabriellexgem.
