Workplace or Watchtower? Examining the Rise of Employee Surveillance

What motivates you the most in the workplace? Is it the sense of accomplishment from completing a challenging project? Or maybe the camaraderie of collaborating with a great team? No, of course not. Silly of you to think that! The thing that motivates all of us, of course, is fear and paranoia that comes from workplace surveillance! It is the sentiment of an invisible omnipresence—with the threat of criticism, punishment, or even unemployment—that will deliver managers the best results. What else could drive productivity quite like the Orwellian nightmare of constantly being watched by your superior?

This seems to be the mindset of many modern employers, given the unprecedented adoption of increasingly invasive surveillance technology in the workplace. While workplace monitoring is nothing new (especially in industries with historically low-wage or marginalized workers), the COVID-19 pandemic hastened its ubiquitous adoption. With the rise of the work from home model, an unprecedented number of white-collar workers were forced to adjust to constant surveillance from their employers.

As companies adopt increasingly powerful tools to track workers, concerns have grown over privacy, workplace power imbalances, and employee well-being. At the same time, precarious employment and declining unionization have eroded workers’ leverage to resist these measures. Canada’s current legal framework falls short in protecting employees from excessive surveillance, raising concerns from experts about how workplace monitoring is regulated.

The Evolution of Workplace Surveillance

The surveillance of employees by their employers is not a new phenomenon. It is rooted in a historic distrust of workers, particularly low-wage workers with racist foundations in slavery. Indeed, modern management’s obsession with oversight and efficiency is a by-product of Taylorism, which found its roots on the plantation (yikes). Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the panopticon, the state of being subject to constant asymmetrical surveillance, is made possible through modern technology (e.g., video surveillance; computer, e-mail, and phone monitoring; location tracking; and biometric timekeeping). While Bentham’s idea was meant to be used to control the behaviour of prisoners, this technology has been applied by employers to create a workplace panopticon.

Digital surveillance often includes the use of AI, which helps employers to target a wide range of information, including thoughts, feelings, physiology, location and movement, task performance and professional profile and reputation, that is collected as data. The data is then fed into AI modelling systems that construct profiles of behaviour, patterns, and benchmarks, to be used to infer characteristics or predict behaviour. While these inferences may be incorrect or biased, they are often used in crucial decision-making processes by employers, including hiring, firing, promoting and demoting decisions. Global demand for employee surveillance tools surged during the pandemic, and though the technology offers benefits for employers, its drawbacks raise significant ethical concerns.

Benefits of Workplace Surveillance

Employers argue that workplace surveillance is essential for improving security, preventing theft, protecting intellectual property, and ensuring productivity. Monitoring can prevent security breaches and flag harmful behaviors, such as unsafe driving practices or unauthorized sharing of sensitive information. It can also enhance efficiency by reducing distractions and curbing “time theft”—when employees are on the clock but not working.

The Office, “Dwight Time Thief – The Office US” online: <youtube.com>.
After admonishing Oscar for taking the occasional long lunch, Jim starts tracking Dwight’s “time theft”. This includes yawns, sneezes, personal conversations, and bathroom breaks. All of which could be tracked by your employer using modern surveillance technology.

Employers are especially concerned with time theft. Surveillance tools are viewed as a deterrent to such behavior, allowing companies to monitor how employees use their time and hold them accountable for any distractions. However, this justification becomes less credible when surveillance is primarily used to boost productivity through invasive techniques.

The Drawbacks of Workplace Surveillance

Critics of workplace surveillance identify numerous negative outcomes that may be categorized into three core themes: employee well-being, labour relations, and privacy and data. A study for the European Commission showed that strict workplace monitoring may cause negative psycho-social effects including stress, negative trust perceptions, and decreased job satisfaction and commitment. In the long run, these issues can lead to higher turnover rates, lower productivity, and toxic workplace cultures. In fact, a recent Cornell study showed that employees of organizations that use AI to monitor employees perceive reduced autonomy and are more likely to engage in resistance behaviours, which may lead to increased dissatisfaction and turnover.

Surveillance also reinforces power imbalances, with low-wage and racial minority workers disproportionately subjected to monitoring. These groups often work in roles where digital oversight is most intense—such as warehouses or gig economy jobs—making them more vulnerable to being tracked and controlled. Notably, companies like Amazon have been criticized for using AI-powered surveillance systems that automatically terminate employees who fail to meet productivity targets.

In addition to fostering power imbalances, digital surveillance raises privacy concerns, particularly with the rise of data brokers who collect and sell personal information. Some companies, such as credit-reporting firms, may use this data in unethical ways, including targeting vulnerable communities with predatory lending practices. The lack of transparency surrounding data collection and use leaves workers in the dark, often unaware of how their personal information is being used or shared.

Canada’s Current Regulatory Landscape

In Canada, workplace surveillance is primarily regulated by privacy laws, such PIPEDA, along with various provincial laws. These regulations govern how employers can collect, use, and disclose personal information, but they leave room for significant employer discretion.

Employers are required to obtain consent to monitor workers, but the power dynamics of employment make meaningful consent difficult. Courts have ruled that simply accepting a job implies consent to surveillance, even though employees may not fully understand the scope of monitoring. Additionally, as long as the surveillance serves a business interest, which include safety, theft prevention and productivity, it is generally deemed reasonable.

While PIPEDA places some limits on what data can be collected and how, it is often insufficient in protecting employees from invasive or exploitative practices. In 2022, Ontario passed legislation (the Working for Workers Act) requiring companies to disclose their surveillance policies, but this measure is a small step compared to the comprehensive regulations needed to safeguard employee rights.

What Needs to Change

Currently, there exists four major concerns in the realm of workplace surveillance in Canada: transparency, bias, privacy and data, and power imbalances. To address these concerns, Canada must change its regulatory approach to workplace surveillance. International models, particularly the GDPR, provide valuable guidance on how to better protect workers’ privacy and limit employer overreach.

To ensure transparency, Canada should adopt a provision that requires employers to create a policy that informs employees of the purpose behind their monitoring. The issue of bias can be mitigated by adopting the GDPR’s ban on automated decision-making processes and by requiring a mechanism to challenge employer decisions based on monitored data where human bias could have been a factor. To address privacy and data protection, Canada should adopt Privacy by Design principles, which offer a proactive approach to technology that prioritizes privacy throughout the development process. Legislative efforts should also be made to safeguard sensitive information, to strictly limit the use of facial recognition technology, and to ban the use of purported “emotion recognition technology.”

To address the power imbalance, legislators must recognize that surveillance is a powerful tool that may compromise human dignity. When an employer infringes on an employee’s privacy, what falls within the scope of reasonable surveillance should be strictly limited. While reducing risk and liability and protecting confidential information should be considered legitimate, productivity concerns should not. The risk that constant surveillance poses to employees—including their mental well-being, labour relations, and privacy and data—is not outweighed by an employer’s interest in making sure their employee doesn’t spend too long in the bathroom or look away from their monitor for a moment too long. This is particularly true in light of the fact that monitoring may actually result in productivity reduction. To combat power imbalances inherent in the workplace, future regulation must prioritize human dignity over an employer’s distrust in their employee’s capacity to work autonomously.

Conclusion

Workplace surveillance is evolving rapidly, and while it may offer certain perceived benefits for employers, it poses significant risks to workers’ privacy and mental well-being. Just because technology allows employers to monitor their employees eye movement and track their keystrokes—doesn’t mean they should. With the rise in AI monitoring that can be used to infer an employee’s emotional state, surveillance tools are increasingly invasive and often disproportionate to the risks they’re meant to mitigate. Employees deserve to be treated as autonomous individuals, not as productivity metrics or potential “time thieves.”

The obsessive desire to squeeze every ounce of labour possible from employees is as greedy as it is senseless. It brings me back to when my manager used to make all the servers unfold perfectly clean cutlery to re-shine and fold them up again whenever the restaurant was slow. Perish the thought that a lowly employee might be paid by their employers for even a moment to do something other than toil. But I digress; the point is, while invasive employee monitoring does not guarantee productivity, it does oftentimes reinforce a toxic workplace culture. So long as employees are reaching their targets and meeting their deadlines, is it really so bad if they spend 10 minutes on the clock doing their daily Wordle?