Reflecting on the future of workplace surveillance
In this post, Jessica Vitak and Michael Zimmer reflect on their article ‘Power, Stress, and Uncertainty: Experiences with and Attitudes toward Workplace Surveillance During a Pandemic’, which appeared in the 21(1) issue of Surveillance & Society.
Pandemic-related upheavals were felt across nearly all aspects of people’s lives, including how and where they worked. Our article in Surveillance & Society explores the surveillance implications of the sudden shift to remote work in March 2020. Through a survey of 645 US-based workers, we found that the amount and diversity of surveillance tools used in the workplace increased during the first six months of the pandemic for many workers. We also identified gender disparities in how the pandemic affected work experiences, with women more likely to report increases in job-related stress and concerns about their job security.
This study was motivated by a trend we saw in the early months of the pandemic. Throughout spring 2020, major media outlets published numerous articles on new surveillance tools to facilitate remote employee monitoring. Hubstaff, for example, generates productivity scores by analyzing workers’ clicks, keyboard input, and mouse movements, while also taking a screenshot every few minutes and capturing website browsing activities. Microsoft built similar tools into its popular Microsoft 365 platform, allowing managers to track employees’ activity at an individual level.
Research has highlighted how these technologies create new threats to worker privacy and create or exacerbate power imbalances. In 2019, Data & Society highlighted four broad trends in workplace surveillance, including the use of prediction and flagging tools, biometric and health data, and algorithmic management. Amazon’s aggressive surveillance of its workers — both in its warehouses and of its growing fleet of drivers — has received significant criticism. Likewise, Karen Levy provides a deep look into surveillance in the trucking industry in her 2022 book Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance, and she joins Solon Barocas in a 2018 discussion of how the increased monitoring of retail shoppers also constitutes a new form of “refractive surveillance” of retail workers themselves. Across these examples, attempts at increasing workplace efficiency, productivity, and safety through increased surveillance inevitably leads to concerns over privacy and power.
Increased health-related surveillance (e.g., enforcing physical distance, temperature checks, and proof of vaccination) was expected during the pandemic, but is still concerning given the sensitive nature of health data. We have previously explored tensions between privacy and health data in relation to contact tracing apps, and the workers we surveyed also expressed concerns about health data collection. We delve into this more in another paper using this same dataset, with respondents finding health data collection by their employers to be much more inappropriate than more traditional data types. Further, respondents found data collection for the purpose of reducing the spread of COVID-19 to be appropriate, but other health-related purposes (e.g., promoting healthy behaviors) were seen as less appropriate. Such findings are even more important when we consider the dramatic increase in workplace wellness programs over the last decade, which generally involve some data collection from workers, often through employer-provided wearable devices or social apps.
What was missing from our research was the voices of those who could not shift to remote work during the pandemic. Many retail and hospitality jobs shut down in March 2020, while many essential workers (including those working in warehouses, food processing plants, and as part of the gig economy) continued working or even saw their workload increase. We are most concerned about the harms these populations may experience as worker monitoring continues to increase. We hope to explore this more in future work, but in the meantime, we encourage you to read two recent reports from Data & Society, one on “wellness capitalism” and a second on surveillance of essential workers.
