In the first weeks of the pandemic back in the spring of 2020, as many as half of U.S. Policy and regulatory solutions to address surveillance harms should address not only the use of technology in the workplace, but also the structural causes that fissure employment relationships and de-skill jobs, and work to strengthen worker power to protect workers’ rights and improve their economic outcomes now and in the years to come.
The dangers posed by workplace surveillance fall most heavily on the most vulnerable workers, exacerbating an array of economic inequalities and preventing these workers from challenging these increasingly invasive practices.Pervasive surveillance not only undermines worker power but also adds to the already-weakened state of worker power in the United States that allows firms to further surveil and exploit workers. The ubiquity of technologically enabled workplace monitoring and lack of privacy protections continues a harmful cycle.Worker monitoring is part of a cycle of fractured work arrangements through which firms de-skill work and misclassify employees, allowing them to pay workers less, sidestep worker protections, and undermine workers’ bargaining ability, ultimately increasing economic inequality and distorting economic growth.It enables illegal discrimination, hampers worker organizing, and leads to constant stress for workers who can be fired at any time. Workplace surveillance fundamentally shifts the dynamics of power in the workplace in favor of firms in ways that harm workers and drive inequitable growth.Invasive and exploitative workplace surveillance in the United States is now growing largely unchecked due to weak worker power and a lack of legal protections or regulatory restrictions on these behaviors.
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