Photo by Helena Lopes ()

Ali Mesbahian is an IPilogue Writer and a 2L JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School.

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The Dystopian State of Surveillance in the Workplace

The ongoing pandemic has shaken up of the world of work. With the emergence of COVID-19, distinctions between on-site and remote workers became intuitive and reliance on technology for attuning the workforce to the situation of a pervasive contagion rapidly increased. This has naturally caused worries about the future of labour relations, the , and automation.

While remote work has its , caution must be exercised against hastily treating the situation as liberating. After all, the flexibility and cost-effectiveness associated with remote work did not result from collective bargaining by employees and labour unions, but emerged from a public-health necessity. As Antonio Aloisi and Valerio De Stefano , the result is an asymmetrical distribution of the benefits of digitalization—as evidenced by the technology (more than 58 percent since the beginning of the pandemic). In many firms, working at home has made bare an as workers are often called to download apps that track how long they are away from the computer (), record and send their web-history to their employers (), and take screenshots of their desktops ().

Against Technological Determinism

On the other hand, it is important to dispel any conception of technology that grants it an agency of its own, as if acting as an imposing itself on societal relations, labour markets, and daily tasks. For instance, AI is often said to inevitably replace many jobs performed by humans; self-checkout machines in grocery stores are a common example. While there is some truth to this statement, emphasizing inevitability tends to mask the bigger picture that human decisions—more precisely, those of the tech elite, policy makers, security and military officials, and employers – fundamentally shape technological progress.

As Aloisi and De Stefano emphasize, .” In other words, it matters whether technology and machinery are used and developed for the purposes of extracting profit and cutting down costs, or for the purposes of building trust in work relations and increasing workers’ . For instance, ” may provide the conditions for establishing a four-day workweek, according to a 2018 study by the Social Market Foundation.

Moreover, automation often increases demand for complementary skills. For instance, A human-centered research mandate and policy objective would thereby identify the required complimentary skills borne out of the automation process in order to create jobs and increase wages. As Frank Pasquale, professor at Brooklyn Law School, rhetorically asks: This invokes broader questions, often relegated to the sidelines, . The issue is, of course, political at heart; a worker-affirming answer to such questions depends on structural changes that place workers as powerful stakeholders in the decision-making process that underlies the direction of technological advancement.

The post Concerning But Not Predetermined: A Short Note on Technology and the Future of Work appeared first on IPOsgoode.

Photo Credits: Claire Wortsman

ClaireĚýWortsmanĚýis anĚýIPilogueĚýWriter and a 2L JD Candidate atĚýOsgoodeĚýHall Law School.Ěý

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I am writing this article on a particularly sunny day. In order to take advantage of this rare Toronto sunshine, I am lying down in the grass with my parent’s pandemic puppy. Although I personally believe that this environment is highly conducive to productivity, I am not so sure I want my boss to know about my remote office set-up. While much of the privacy discourse surrounding remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic has centered around , I am also concerned about work-from-home surveillance.Ěý

Without the ability to physically oversee workers, some businesses are turning to digital surveillance. For example, is a popular platform that to photograph employees every few minutes and generate a “wall of faces” which managers can review. While Sneek may combat certain challenges of remote work, such as communication lapses and feelings of isolation, it carries the risk of Âľ “the expansion of a system or technology beyond its original purposes” Âľ and could result in a loss of privacy for remote workers if misused by management. Maclean’s that companies like Sneek, which sell software that reports employee’s work ethic (sometimes referred to as “tattleware”), saw a huge increase in demand amidst the pandemic. Many “tattleware” companies frame their product as a way of restoring “,” although David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and Founder of remote-work-software firm Basecamp, that this “New Age language of social gathering” is being employed to “[elide] over the fact that workers are being watched.”Ěý

Violations of workers’ privacy may constitute a statutory or common-law tort, depending on the province. In Ontario, workplace violations of privacy are considered an intrusion upon seclusion, a tort recognized by the 2012 Court of Appeal decision in . However, the unique context of remote work creates uncertainty about where, when, and how surveillance is allowed. While a workplace is more cut-and-dry, with surveillance being permitted in public areas (e.g., a common workspace with cubicles) and not in areas with a “reasonable expectation of privacy” (e.g., washrooms and changerooms), things become complicated when our homes are also our workplaces and the line between personal and professional space is blurred. Silkie Carlo, director of the anti-surveillance charity Big Brother Watch, that, “it’s important for people’s sense of autonomy and dignity, and their mental health, that the home remains a private space and we don’t go down the route of this really invasive constant monitoring of people’s homes.”

The increase in remote work surveillance sparked by the pandemic has accelerated the shift towards digital work supervision, prompting Sean Captain of Fast Company to that in the future, our supervisors will be less “the man” and more “the machine.” PwC, for example, has already been for going too far after developing a facial recognition tool that logs when workers are absent from their computers. If and when legal challenges arise to address rapidly changing surveillance practices, worry that arbitrators and courts will be out of sync with public expectations and be overly permissive of surveillance.ĚýĚý

Although vaccination rates are increasing across the country, the national president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, Chris Aylward, recently that “a return to the workplace is really not on the radar right now.” As companies adjust to the longer-than-expected period of remote work, they are looking to minimize the possibility of data breaches and maximize productivity. It may be tempting to implement worker surveillance software in pursuit of these goals, and in an effort to restore a sense of office culture, but businesses should also give weight to the potential legal and ethical consequences of doing so.Ěý Ěý

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