O brave new world of worker surveillance

This is atrocious, at least in my view, and I don’t know of a ready fix.

Technological incentives are a new adversary in the long history of workers trying to keep the tentacles of corporate America out of their personal lives. But unlike the precipitating causes of the bloody 1886 Haymarket Riot, where Chicago workers protested the blatant incursion of longer working hours despite their legal entitlement to an eight-hour workday, modern employer surveillance is restructuring the lives of workers in gradual and nearly imperceptible ways. The lines of what is work and what is life in the consecrated “work-life balance” are blurring because of the way surveillance technologies are proliferating. What began in the workplace is leaking its bile across your lap as you sit at home...

The physical workplace may be where employer surveillance started, but it’s not where it ends. The days of surveillance being technologically limited to physical spaces and analog tools like building cameras are slipping away. In their place are more accurate and ubiquitous technologies that run on hardware that employees already use, like computers and phones. And as more employees do their work outside of physical offices, the employer surveillance apparatus has mutated to keep them ensnared. The forecast is that soon at least 70 percent of companies will be using software that tracks worker productivity via their computers. This tracking might include keylogging, location tracking, web and email monitoring, or even in some cases, taking images of workers through their webcams at random intervals throughout the day. The expansion of these tracking technologies was another flare-up that the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated, and the logics of tracking that were established for remote work are here to stay. “Here,” in this case, meaning the home office, the living room, or any personal space where one uses digital devices. - The Baffler