Nov. 14, 2022 "Pssst: your employer is probably surveilling you": Today I found this article by Arianne Cohen on BNN Bloomberg:
The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an array of new employee-monitoring technologies that most workers haven't caught up with—from productivity software on phones and computers and GPS trackers to wearable technologies like construction helmets and tools that follow your social-media activity during work hours.
Some are obvious. Even bosses with little tech savvy can get a snapshot of your day by tracking your use of programs like Zoom, Slack, Google Workspace and Microsoft Office, plus logins to corporate terminals.
Ifeoma Ajunwa, an associate professor at UNC School of Law and author of the upcoming The Quantified Worker: Law and Technology in the Modern Workplace (Cambridge University Press, March 2023), discusses this growing workplace surveillance. Her responses were condensed and edited.
How can employees find out the extent to which they're being surveilled?
They can't. They could ask directly, and the employer could decide to share, but there is no sure way to know, because there's no federal law that requires your employer to tell you. It does depend on the state. In California, there are rules that require your employer to tell you exactly how they surveil you.
So most people should just assume they're being surveilled?
Yes. Know that emails and any communication in the workplace can be surveilled, as well as corporate accounts. And you wouldn't necessarily expect that things in your home will be surveilled, but if you bring your work devices home, like vehicles, computers or phones, you should know that those usually can have GPS-enabled tracking capabilities.
What exactly is the point of tracking knowledge workers, especially if they're generally productive?
This is really about an ideology: that employees need to be held sort of accountable and captive for the hours that the employer thinks is necessary to get the job done. So it's really about an ideology rather than an objective.
There's no U.S. law limiting extreme surveillance?
I testified before Congress urging legislative action in February 2020, but unfortunately I don't really see the political will right now. I really hope that people will realize that this is a nonpartisan issue.
If surveillance is so common, how come we rarely see workers fired because they went to Krispy Kreme?
People are definitely getting fired, but you may not read about it because people sign something called a Notice of Consequence, where the employer says, “Oh, you will be surveilled” without necessarily telling exactly how. It is used as the premise for firing.
Can you give an example?
There was a case in California about a female junior executive who had been obligated to download an app that tracks your location. She later discovered that she could never actually turn the app off—she would turn it off after work hours, but it was still on. She learned this because her supervisor was telling her what she had done over the weekend and how fast she had been driving. California is one of the states that has passed a law curtailing how far employers can go.
Is monitoring always a bad thing for employees?
It depends how the employer deploys it. If the supervisor has discriminatory intent, it's a tool that can be wielded in various discriminatory ways. When everyone is surveilled, it doesn't mean that everyone is surveilled equally.
Are there any potential upsides to being surveilled?
You don't have a literal supervisor looking over your shoulder. That might actually be a relief for employees more vulnerable to discrimination on the basis of identities like race or sexual orientation. They can just focus on work and not do all the other shadow or emotional work to “fit in” at work.
Why did you call your book The Quantified Worker?
We've always had worker surveillance, from the Roman Empire to the Industrial Revolution. We kind of needed a way to keep track of everyone and what they're supposed to be doing.
But now technologies allow workers to be surveilled to a much greater extent than ever previously imagined, and as a result we're heading toward quantifying workers.
What do you mean by that?
We're treating workers not as whole human beings, but as the amount of work they can provide, and the quantity of risk that they represent—you know, the employer pays for their health insurance. That's a big change in the relationship between employers and employees.
What happens when employees are over-monitored?
Several studies show that it makes workers more inefficient and discourages creativity. When people are doing their jobs, they quickly figure out the best and quickest ways of doing things—you actually want that.
Over-monitored workers are worried about deviating. And, of course, research shows that creativity happens when you have some downtime. Monitoring encourages busy work.
What's the biggest misconception that most people have about surveillance?
We have the impression that there's a huge gulf between how white and blue collar workers are managed and monitored, but there really is not. White collar workers used to have more freedom in terms of autonomy, but with monitoring, everyone is being surveilled.
Pssst: your employer is probably surveilling you - BNN Bloomberg
Dec. 9, 2022 "Digital hour-logging is mandatory for truckers. Surveillance experts worry it won't stop there": Today I found this article by Jason Vermes on CBC:
Technology to track truckers while they're on the road could be a canary in the coal mine for workplace surveillance, experts say.
Electronic logging devices (ELD) are billed as a way to make roads safer by keeping truckers accountable to their allowed hours of service. But the devices raise questions about what information employers are collecting about their workers.
"People sort of tend to view the trucker as an 'other,'" said Karen Levy, author of Data Driven: Truckers, Technology and the New Workplace Surveillance. "They maybe say … 'You know, that maybe makes sense for truckers, but it wouldn't make sense for me.'"
"The issues truckers are facing, I think, are issues that everybody is beginning to face — particularly post-pandemic — as these technologies become used in more remote work."
Transport Canada will begin enforcing the use of ELDs for certain commercial vehicle drivers, such as long-haul truckers, on Jan. 1, 2023. The regulation, which came into effect in June 2021, aims to track a driver's hours of service — the amount of time they can be behind the wheel on any given day. ELDs have been required in the United States since 2017.
In addition to logging the number of hours a driver operates the vehicles, the devices can track information such as vehicle location and speed.
Levy said that the proliferation of ELDs has opened the doors for other monitoring systems that can monitor driving behaviours, like hard braking or swerving, and may include driver-facing cameras that use artificial intelligence to track eye movements and check for signs of drowsiness.
The devices don't address the factors she says are driving fatigue among many truckers, including declining wages over decades.
"If you look at the way that people respond to these things — and I think the way any of us would respond — what that ends up meaning is that workers feel kind of a lack of dignity in their job, they feel a lack of trust in their job" said Levy, an assistant professor of information science at Cornell University in New York.
"And that often, you know, runs people out of those jobs."
ELDs add transparency, says association
The Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA), a group representing trucking associations across the country, says it's "100 per cent supportive" of the federal government's ELD mandate.
"They add transparency, they level the playing field, they save time for drivers and companies … [and] they add accountability to the entire process," said Geoff Wood, senior vice-president of communications for CTA.
Under federal hours of service rules, drivers are not allowed to drive more than 13 hours in a day.
The incoming mandate, he says, aims to automate the process of logging their driving hours, something they are already doing manually. Drivers previously filled out paper log books.
That's left the system open to abuse by some drivers and companies who manipulate hours, Wood says. Transport Canada estimates five to 10 per cent of drivers routinely exceed allowable hours of service. Digital tracking will help alleviate that, CTA argues.
Wood said that separate systems, like the driver monitoring systems Levy mentions, go beyond the federal ELD mandate and would be a "business decision."
But ELDs signal a continuing trend of what Vass Bednar, the executive director of the Master of Public Policy program at McMaster University, calls the "datafication" of work, particularly among front-line workers.
She says, for example,
fast-food workers have their drive-through times monitored,
call centre operators have the number of calls they take counted,
and delivery drivers are tracked on the number of packages they drop off.
Using ELDs to improve safety for drivers and the public can be valuable,
but potentially using that data to improve efficiency could prove problematic, she said.
"When that surveillance is used to 'data-ify' the job and track how many deliveries that person made in a day, and pushing them to cut corners or accelerate through red lights, or causing people to urinate or defecate in bottles in their truck because they're fearful of taking any time off to tend to natural bodily functions, then I think we're using it improperly," Bednar said.
In a statement, Transport Canada said that ELDs must comply with specific technical standards that protect a driver's privacy. For example, when a vehicle is in operation for personal use, the standard limits recorded data to a "strict minimum," it said. The department acknowledged, however, that some ELD vendors may include features beyond the scope of what's required under federal regulation.
Balancing data with rights of workers
Surveillance has been sold as a way to make the world safer and improve people's lives, but there's little data to indicate that's true, said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.
"Whether it's the home security system that tracks us when we go in and out of our house, or whether it's corporate surveillance in the office, people keep seeing this as the symbol of safety," said Cahn.
A 2021 study by researchers at the University of Arkansas found that while driver compliance around hours of service improved, accidents increased following the introduction of the ELD mandate in the U.S.
"Surprisingly, the number of accidents for the most-affected carriers — those operators for whom the federal mandate was intended — did not decrease," said research associate Andrew Balthrop in a news release.
Levy, who interviewed truckers in the U.S. for her recently released book, said they carry a deep sense of pride for their work — and many took on the job because of its autonomy. In a truck cab, there is no boss constantly looking over your shoulder.
The ELD mandate, Levy added, has led some experienced drivers with proven safety records to leave the industry.
"The people who are, I think, less resistant are the young, new drivers," she said. "You don't necessarily want to be next to a brand new, 18 year old with a brand new [commercial driver's license]."
As the pandemic pushes workplace surveillance into white-collar jobs, thanks in part to the explosion of remote work, Bednar says questions are emerging about how businesses are using employee data.
What that means for workers, however, is still unclear.
"We're in a data-hungry moment. We want to learn as much about our business so we can make good decisions, and that's true," she said.
"But balancing that with the proportionality and the rights of workers is not something that I think any one jurisdiction has quite figured out just yet."
Interviews with Karen Levy and Albert Fox Cahn produced by Nora Young and Olsy Sorokina.
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