Digital monitoring of employees infringes rights

Published Jan 8, 2017

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AN INCREASING number of companies are beginning to digitally monitor their employees.

While employers have always scrutinised their workers’ performance, the rise of wearable technology to keep tabs has more of a dystopian edge to it. Monitoring has become easier and more intrusive, and is not limited only to the workplace – it’s 24/7.

Devices such as Fitbit, Nike+ FuelBand and Jawbone UP, which can record information related to health, fitness, sleep quality, fatigue levels and location, are now being used by employers who integrate wearable devices into employee wellness programmes.

One of the first was BP America, which introduced Fitbit bracelets in 2013. In 2015 at least 24 500 BP employees were using them, and more and more US employers have followed suit.

In the UK, similar projects are under consideration by major employers. By 2018, estimates suggest that more than 13 million of these devices will be part of worker wellness schemes. Some analysts say that by the same year, at least 2 million employees worldwide will be required to wear health-and-fitness trackers as a condition of employment.

Chris Brauer, an academic at Goldsmiths, University of London, argues that corporate managers will now be comparable to football managers.

They will be equipped with a dashboard of employee performance trajectories, as well as their fatigue and sleep levels. They will be able to pick only the fittest employees for important meetings, presentations or negotiations.

It seems, however, that such optimism overlooks important negative and potentially dangerous social consequences of using this kind of technology.

The monitoring of workers’ health outside the workplace was once attempted by the Ford Motor Company. When Ford introduced a moving assembly line in 1913 – a revolutionary innovation that enabled complete control over the pace of work – the increase in productivity was dramatic. But so was the rise in worker turnover. In 1913, every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963, as workers struggled to keep up with the pace and left shortly after being recruited.

Ford’s solution to this problem was to double wages. In 1914, the introduction of a $5 a day wage was announced, which immediately led to a decline in worker turnover. But high wages came with a condition: the adoption of healthy and moral lifestyles.

Analysing Ford’s policies, Italian political philosopher and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci coined the term “Fordism” for this social phenomenon. It signalled fundamental changes to labour, which became much more intense after automation.

Today we are faced with another great change to how work is done. To begin with, the “great doubling” of the global labour force has led to an increase in competition between workers around the world. This has resulted in a deterioration of working and employment conditions, the growth of informal and precarious labour, and the intensification of exploitation in the West.

Ford’s sociology department was shut down in the early 1920s for two reasons. It became too costly to maintain it in the context of increasing competition from other car manufacturers. And also because of growing employee resistance to home visits by inspectors, increasingly seen as too intrusive into their private lives.

Wearable technology, however, does not have these inconveniences. It is not costly and it is much less obviously intrusive than surprise home visits by company inspectors. Employee resistance appears to be low.

The idea of being tracked has mostly gone unchallenged.

The use of wearable technology by employers raises a range of concerns. The most obvious is the right to privacy.

Surveillance becomes continuous and all-encompassing, increasingly unconfined to the workplace, and also constitutes a form of surveillance which penetrates the human body. The right to equal employment opportunities and promotion may also be compromised if employers reserve promotion for those who are in a better physical shape or suffer less from fatigue or stress.

To protect individual rights, systems have been introduced to regulate how data that is gathered on employees is stored and used. So one possible solution is to render the data collected by trackers compulsorily anonymous.

This, however, does not address concerns about the increasing commodification of human labour that comes with the use of wearable technology and any potential threats to society. To prevent this, it is perhaps necessary to consider imposing an outright ban on its use by employers altogether.

Ivan Manokha is a departmental lecturer in international political economy at the University of Oxford. This article first appeared in The Conversation

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