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During the coronavirus pandemic, some degree of remote surveillance has quickly become the norm for white-collar workers.
First they came for the freelancers. Chris had a decade of experience as a consultant to various Bay Area tech companies when, in 2017, a firm agreed to hire him on the condition that they could install a form of spyware on his laptop for the duration of his contract. “They were very clear that they would use this program to gauge my productivity, and that it could be used against me,” he told me. The software, called Hubstaff, would allow the company to monitor his work routine remotely via his webcam, as well as his keystrokes and social media use, offering detailed analytics of his performance.
Chris considered declining the offer but soon decided it was the cost of business. “It was that or don’t pay rent. What choice did I have?”
Hubstaff was originally developed in response to a growing legion of freelance workers who worked outside the office, beyond the panoptic force of company culture. As businesses tried to lower costs by decentralizing operations and relying on independent contractors, long-distance surveillance software became key to ensuring strict attention to deadlines and schedules.
The pandemic has vastly heightened management’s insecurity about a remote workforce lollygagging (or taking care of their children) on company time, and some degree of remote surveillance has quickly become the norm for white-collar workers. Hubstaff CEO Dave Nevogt told NPR that demand for his company’s services has tripled since the start of the pandemic.
Given that the home often doubles as a workplace these days, the recent explosion of digital monitoring raises privacy concerns. But the pandemic provides a context for it to further erode workers’ on-the-job power too.
We know a lot about workplace surveillance of essential workers. I interviewed laundry workers who fought against what they called the “electronic whip,” software that projected each workers’ productivity score onto a color-coded leader board, encouraging them to pick up the pace. I met long-haul truckers who engaged in a nationwide “slow roll” protest against the implementation of “electronic location devices” that restructured the times they drive in ways that they say aren’t safe. Nurses are increasingly mandated to wear geo-location badges to help track them throughout the hospital. And leaked documents show that Amazon developed an automated tracking and termination process that it used to fire hundreds of warehouse workers for an offense listed as “productivity trend.”
Surveillance of white-collar workers, however, is often hidden from view by employers and major spyware companies, making it difficult to estimate the exact scope. But a 2019 survey by the American Management Association found at least 66 percent of U.S. companies monitor their employees’ internet use, 45 percent log their keystrokes, and 43 percent track their emails.
And it’s a growth industry. The coronavirus crisis has elevated the perceived need for technological control within workplaces, as public-health concerns overlap with managerial authority at work. The multibillion-dollar movement to wiretap the workplace includes dozens of businesses: ActivTrak, Avaza, VeriClock, Boomr, Hubstaff, TSheets, StaffCop, Time Doctor, DeskTime Pro, TrackView, InterGuard, and fittingly, even one called Wiretap.
These services create minute-by-minute audio, video, and photographic evidence of a particular worker and workstation. This new level of granularity allows managers to decide what counts as payable work time, and to exclude “unproductive” periods like bathroom breaks. Some time-tracking programs even have a default setting that automatically reduces employees’ payable time by factoring in rest, whether workers took a break or not.
The tools are typically marketed to employers as productivity enhancements, but in the hands of managers they also serve a disciplinary function. In a widely publicized case, Myrna Arias, a former employee at Intermex Wire Transfer, was fired when she deleted a location-tracking app that was to remain on her smartphone even during nonwork hours, which she likened to a “prisoner’s ankle bracelet” in her lawsuit. Similar lawsuits abound in other industries, raising legal questions about privacy and worker autonomy.
A feature in Wired details how two corporate snoops, who spoke anonymously, fired workers after “auditing” their employees’ productivity via “bossware.” They saw the practice as part of doing business during the pandemic, claiming that remote workers are more likely to slack off. Sometimes, however, the technology is explicitly punitive. InterGuard, whose parent company claims to have grown its customer base by over 300 percent in the first weeks of the pandemic, boasts that its product “can be silently and remotely installed, so you can conduct covert investigations and bullet-proof evidence gathering without alarming the suspected wrongdoer.”
A 2019 survey found at least 66 percent of U.S. companies monitor their employees’ internet use, 45 percent log their keystrokes, and 43 percent track their emails.
The Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), a now-defunct congressional analyst eliminated by Newt Gingrich, first sounded the alarm on electronic workplace surveillance in 1987. The findings highlighted “a basic tension between an employer’s right to control or manage the work process and an employee’s right to autonomy, dignity, and privacy.” The findings, which are just as true today, make clear that workplace surveillance is facilitated not only by technology but by a weak and disorganized working population.
The report found that the simultaneous decline in unionization rates and advances in workplace surveillance could lead to “unfair or abusive monitoring.” The OTA report estimated six to eight million persons were subject to surveillance, at a time when 20 percent of the workforce was unionized. By 1996, that number spiked to an estimated 40 million surveilled, when only 15 percent of workers had a union. Today, union membership hovers around 10 percent, and in 2019 the research firm Gartner predicted an 80 percent rise in “nontraditional” monitoring techniques, including analyzing person-to-person contact; viewing emails, social media posts, and telephone records; and examining genetic and biometric data.
Surveillance has been universally reviled by workers ever since Frederick Winslow Taylor walked into a factory in 1898 with a slide rule and a stopwatch and began telling skilled craftsmen how to do their jobs more efficiently. It was parodied in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, when an omniscient boss, appearing spontaneously on a large TV screen, could scold workers for taking bathroom breaks. The steady growth of the employee surveillance state means that management has mostly been getting its way. A major reason is the popular tendency to look at the problem from the individual worker’s standpoint rather than as a collective grievance.
Labor unions and some NGOs have occasionally resisted surveillance through workplace activism. In health care, transportation, and logistics, workers have started to bargain over the increasing use of surveillance technology, as employees often interpret it as an extension of a bawling foreman or creepy boss.
Among white-collar workers, surveillance can also be executed with a velvet touch, an approach consciously designed to fit status and class aspirations. Moreover, because white-collar employee actions are less routine and more difficult to predict, especially from a distance, employers increasingly gravitate toward not just apps or tools, but an entirely new managerial ethos—rule by data.
Among white-collar workers, surveillance has become indistinguishable from data capture. The mythical neutrality of such information-gathering renders it seemingly benign. But when employees don’t have access to the same information, employers put themselves in a stronger negotiating position when workers ask for raises, benefits, or better schedules. According to a survey by Accenture, two-thirds of business leaders said they are “not very confident” that they’re using new sources of workplace data in a “highly responsible way.” And less than a third of employees say they have consented to employer use of workplace data, while more than half of employers say they do not even seek consent. The pandemic has seemed to intensify the need for information-gathering, as workplaces have become crucial to reducing the spread of COVID-19, either through social-distancing protocols, work-from-home programs, or thermal temperature scanners at the worksite entrance.
Among white-collar workers, surveillance has become indistinguishable from data capture.
It’s also likely that the effects of the pandemic will further erode workplace organizing power, especially among white-collar workers who until recently have had some success in joining unions within digital media, tech, and higher education. Some experts anticipate that about one-third of currently remote workers won’t return to a brick-and-mortar office. As conversations about unionism migrate from the break room to online, workers are increasingly vulnerable to new forms of digital surveillance and retaliation.
The National Labor Relations Board has already ruled that employers can ban workers from using company email to discuss unions. It’s no coincidence that mega-firms most enthralled with remote work have also pioneered anti-union tech tools designed to stop workers from engaging in collective action. Amazon created an email filter that alerted it when certain words were being used, such as union, though its blue-collar warehouse employees are currently poised to organize one in Alabama.
The sheer ubiquity of the internet and digital life means we have grudgingly and to a large degree unwittingly accepted a Faustian bargain—the exchange of unfettered communication and information for our private data. And it seems we have surrendered in much the same way at the workplace, and even in our private homes. Workers need real protections against such invasive spying, not only because it threatens their privacy, but because it diminishes their power.
